


Lorne: Season Three

by Domenika Marzione (domarzione)



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Episode: s03e01 No Man's Land, Episode: s03e02 Misbegotten, Episode: s03e03 Irresistible, Episode: s03e04 Sateda, Episode: s03e05 Progeny, Episode: s03e06 The Real World, Episode: s03e07 Common Ground, Episode: s03e08 McKay and Mrs. Miller, Episode: s03e09 Phantoms, Episode: s03e10 The Return Part 1, Episode: s03e11 The Return Part 2, Episode: s03e12 Echoes, Episode: s03e13 Irresponsible, Episode: s03e14 Tao of Rodney, Episode: s03e15 The Game, Episode: s03e17 Sunday, Episode: s03e18 Submersion, Episode: s03e19 Vengeance, Episode: s03e20 First Strike, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-07-16
Updated: 2007-06-26
Packaged: 2017-12-10 12:39:10
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 20
Words: 45,187
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/786142
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/domarzione/pseuds/Domenika%20Marzione
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Major Lorne was in every episode of Season Three. Even if he wasn't on camera.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> [Cast of Characters/the Big List of OCs (because there are more than seven people in Atlantis and they all have names)](http://archiveofourown.org/works/372765)

_This is not what I had in mind for my next command_ , Lorne told himself.

The _Orion_ needed weeks of work, more equipment than they'd been able to salvage out of Atlantis's shipyards, and about four times the personnel than they'd been able to allocate to the project. They were going to launch in a matter of hours without the crew being able to follow emergency procedures in case something went wrong -- likely -- and he was a little dubious about their ability to _fly_ the ship even if nothing did.

"Are you in charge, sir?"

Lorne looked over at where Reletti was holding some bulky Ancient device for a petite engineer with her head half inside the weapons console. Reletti somehow always ended up helping the pretty scientists, although this one could only be assessed from the neck down. The device he was holding looked vaguely like a giant purple accordion and it was still dusty from disuse -- Reletti's face was streaked gray with dirt.

"Uh... yeah?" he replied because even within the broad spectrum of wacky things that came out of Reletti's mouth, that one seemed sort of self-answerable. Considering that Lorne was currently sitting in the captain's chair.

"Dude, do you _ever_ think before you speak?" Suarez asked as he walked by pushing a hand truck. "Did you miss the whole 'Major Lorne, you'll command the _Orion_ ' part of the OPORD?"

"No you fucktard," Reletti called after Suarez's retreating back, belatedly checking to make sure the engineer didn't hear him curse. "I meant of Atlantis."

Lorne chuckled despite himself and despite the situation. "I'm not that high up on the totem pole, Sergeant."

Sheppard was missing and presumed dead -- whether he was dead now or later depended on whether you believed that his 302 had been destroyed (most everyone) or sucked into hyperspace when the Hive ship opened its window and he'd run out of air before he could get to safety (Zelenka and most of the engineers currently trying to fix the ship). Colonel Caldwell hadn't taken command of the Atlantis Battalion when he'd been planet-side, so technically Lorne was still acting military commander of Atlantis. It was sort of a moot point -- neither the _Orion_ nor the _Daedalus_ expected to emerge from the coming confrontation intact, which was why Caldwell hadn't bothered to assume command, and unless there was some sort of miracle or the _Orion_ proved unable to jump to hyperspace, there was a good chance that Radner would be ranking officer by the end of the day.

"With all due respect, sir," Lieutenant Paik said as he sat in the pilot's seat and tried to work the console. He was the most experienced puddle jumper pilot still in Atlantis, which by the sort of loose logic in effect lately made him the best candidate to fly the _Orion_. "The totem pole got a lot shorter in the last couple of days. Doctor Weir went to Earth, Colonel Sheppard is MIA, Doctor McKay is missing/captured, Colonel Caldwell has not attached himself to the Battalion...."

"And Doctor Beckett is alive, well, and in Atlantis," Lorne finished. They had enough experience with certain variations in the order of succession, especially with Sheppard and McKay going missing semi-regularly, but it was the sudden absence of Doctor Weir that threw everyone for a loop. He'd only found out when he'd radioed in to tell her that they'd brought the secondary engines online and Lieutenant Osgeny had told him that she'd gone through the wormhole.

"Carson's in charge of the expedition?" Safir asked, making a face. He was carrying two large duffels full of medical equipment for the ship's infirmary. "And you wondered why I didn't want to stay behind?"

Knowing it was a longshot after they'd gotten captured by the Genii without him, Lorne had tried to convince Yoni to stay in the city, to be around in case the worst happened and Atlantis needed every fighting man they could get. Yoni had cursed him out -- in English, so he'd be understood -- instead, which was about as much as Lorne had really expected. He could have pulled rank and forced Yoni to stay behind, but he did want him along and they were probably going to need a doctor and Yoni _was_ as much a part of the team as anyone else.

"You didn't want to stay behind because if something happens to Doctor Beckett, _you_ might be in charge of Atlantis," Reletti pointed out, adding a cheeky "Sir" when Yoni glared at him.

The way things worked out, at least on paper, Reletti wasn't wrong. When the command element had returned to Earth from Atlantis last year, Yoni had wound up acting head of the medical unit. With the other acting heads -- himself and Zelenka -- on board the _Orion_ , if Beckett were incapacitated, then civilian command of the expedition _would_ revert to Yoni. As it stood now, however, Lorne hadn't the vaguest idea who would assume control if something happened to Beckett.

As if on cue, Zelenka popped up from behind the console Paik was poking at and slapped at the lieutenant's hands until Paik held them up in surrender. "All right, sir, all right!" Paik agreed, wide-eyed in the face of a torrent of Czech invective.

"Why don't you help Doctor Safir with the medical supplies, Lieutenant," Lorne suggested wryly.

Paik unfolded his long frame and stood up. "Aye aye, sir," he said, moving gingerly away from where Zelenka was pointing what looked like a soldering iron at him.

Safir and Paik disappeared into the fast-moving current of people and equipment.

Lorne sighed and gave Zelenka a tired look and Zelenka shrugged and disappeared back underneath the console.

"You ever see _[Space Camp](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0091993/)_ , sir?"

He turned back around to see Ortilla holding a tablet computer. "No, Staff Sergeant."

Ortilla held out the tablet for him and he accepted it. The screen was full of charts and schematics diagramming the progress of the ship's repairs.

"This kind of reminds me of that," Ortilla said. "Although with all due respect, sir, you're no Kate Capshaw."

For all of the babysitting Ortilla did on missions, Lorne could sometimes forget that he had his own streak of randomness. "I think I'm going to choose to take that as a compliment," he said slowly.

Ortilla was going to say something else, but then Zelenka let rip with another stream of angry Czech and Ortilla executed a strategic withdrawal.

The tablet in his hands told him that life support was at almost 85%, shields somewhere between 30% and 80% (Lorne rolled his eyes at that variability), and main engines were edging past 75% as he watched. Weapons control was flat at zero, weapons supply was growing steadily past 50% -- unless something changed, they'd have plenty of ordinance and no way to use it, and the array of navigational systems were somewhere between "it'll be a miracle if we can _steer_ " and "I've flown Stratotankers in worse shape."

In between answering questions ranging from the idiotic to the impossible, he followed the progress of the ship's repair. When life support hit 100% and engines (primary and secondary) hit 87%, he decided to take a tour of the ship and observe the progress in person instead of via prettily-colored bar graphs captioned in Ancient writing he could only pick at. He was back in the captain's chair two hours later, satisfied that the _Orion_ was something beyond a deathtrap and that maybe she had another miracle tucked into her holds.

There was a sequence of beeps and they all looked around, trying to determine if it was an alarm and what for when Paik -- back at the console, this time with Zelenka's blessings -- laughed. "It's the communications system, sir. We're being hailed."

"Doctor Zelenka?" Lorne prompted. Zelenka muttered something in Czech and then another beeping sequence.

"Major Lorne?" Colonel Caldwell's voice filled the bridge. "We're approaching our T-Zero."

"Zelenka says she'll fly, sir," he replied after Zelenka gestured that he should talk. "But, as of right now, that's about all she _can_ do."

Weapons control was up to 35% and Zelenka was sure -- or maybe sure, it was hard to tell -- that they could get it up to at least 75% in time. Shields hadn't yet decided whether they were at "quick death" or "slower death."

"You'll have thirteen hours en route to get your weapons and shields online," Caldwell reminded him, "But we need to leave right now to make this window. Are you go or no go?"

Lorne looked over at Zelenka, who shrugged. But it was the kind of shrug that Lorne had learned meant that things could be worse. Paik was grinning like a kid -- he _was_ a kid -- and the two engineers who were helping Zelenka looked vaguely anticipatory.

"We're go, sir."


	2. Chapter 2

* * *

  
"Do you have Morrison's personnel file?"  
  
Lorne looked up to see Sheppard in his doorway. He could get up, but Sheppard would just stare at him if he did, so he didn't. "You mean the hard copy, sir?"  
  
It had been a day since Sheppard had gotten back from the planet they'd been jokingly calling Dr. Moreau's Island until Ronon had come back with a handful of dog tags. They hadn't really gotten back to normal after the whole _Orion_ - _Daedalus_ -Hive Ship boogie and now they had to re-arrange life to accomodate the death of another officer.   
  
Sheppard took a step inside and leaned against the file cabinet closest to the door. "Yeah. You're the one with paper copies of everything, so, you know...."  
  
This wasn't the time to be smug about how everyone gave him crap for being a Luddite until they needed something from him, so Lorne pulled the folder out from where it was stacked with the other KIAs and held it out. "It's just a printout of what's in the database. Morrison was only temporarily assigned here, so we didn't get the real thing."  
  
Reggie Morrison, 1LT, USNA Class of 2003 and interim commander of Weapons Company's second platoon while Laura Cadman was on Earth taking a course at sapper school. The file was thin because Lorne hadn't bothered to print out the pages and pages of citations and all of the other material that had gotten Morrison bumped up to the top of the list to be accepted into the Stargate program and sent to Atlantis. The SGC had wanted to keep Morrison on Earth and assign him to one of the SG teams, but Atlantis needed a temporary hole filled and Lorne and Sheppard had successfully argued that a rotation in Atlantis was superb training.   
  
Sheppard pushed off of the file cabinet and sighed, gesturing that he didn't want the file. "The electronic version didn't come with a picture," he said. "We've got the wall ceremony on Friday and no picture to put up. Everyone else's we've got, but not his."  
  
Sheppard came further into the office and dropped down heavily in one of the chairs. It had been a long couple of weeks (months) for them all. It seemed like they hadn't had a pause to breathe since Sheppard had gotten stuck in the time dilation field -- body snatching (on two different occasions -- three if you wanted to count Project Michael), the Goa'uld, the Genii, the Wraith, two coups, exploding planets (thankfully not including Atlantis), hostage exchanges, exploding spaceships, missing teams, and, throughout it all, the long reach of Earth's bureaucrats. Lorne had already sat through his 'interview' with Woolsey and been deemed reticent and unhelpful, which he'd taken as a compliment.   
  
"We can dial Earth and get them to send us a picture," he suggested. "There should have been one with his electronic file, but someone forgot to attach it."  
  
Opening a wormhole to Earth to ask for a picture was a phenomenal waste of limited resources... except if you knew the Marines. The hallway in Little Tripoli where they put the names and faces of the fallen and the missing was as close to a sacred place as the marines had in Atlantis, at least after the chapel. There could be no memorial on Earth, no official recognition of the sacrifices made, but the Marine Corps lived on tradition and history and so they'd come up with this. And, temporary assignment or not, Morrison had died an Atlantis Marine and deserved the full honor of such.   
  
"Yeah, I guess," Sheppard agreed, exhaling heavily. He picked up the Rubik's Cube Lorne kept on his desk as a paperweight. "Caldwell offered to lend us a lieutenant until we either get Cadman back or someone else to be the new Cadman. Apparently he's got a Raven unit on board the _Daedalus_. But I told him I think we'll stick with what we've got for the time being."  
  
Considering that both the _Prometheus_ and the _Daedalus_ had been hijacked, it was no surprise that there were Phoenix Raven teams assigned.   
  
"Mike wants to let Gunny Wilder command the platoon," Lorne agreed. Hanzis had come to him that morning with the request. "I said it was probably fine, but I'd run it by you."  
  
Sheppard nodded without looking up from the toy.   
  
The quiet edged from pause to meaningful silence, so Lorne picked up his pencil and was about to go back to finishing up the tally of munitions expended in the last week when Sheppard finally spoke.   
  
"Beckett asked me if he was supposed to say anything at the ceremony," he said. Lorne put the pencil down and waited. Sheppard looked up. "I told him he didn't have to, that just being there would be enough. I kind of hope he doesn't. He's going to get all apologetic and that's not really the point."  
  
"You want me to get Yoni to talk to him?" Lorne asked, even though they both knew that Beckett getting sniffly and apologizing wasn't really the cause for Sheppard's concern.   
  
Sheppard cocked an eyebrow. "The point is to _not_ make Carson cry."  
  
"They're friends," Lorne explained, fighting a smile when Sheppard's other eyebrow rose.   
  
"I'm not sure how many favors Safir's in the mood to grant the military right now."  
  
The medical unit had... mixed opinions about the retrovirus and everything that came out of that research. Lorne didn't understand half of what they argued about, but while they'd all gone along first with Project Michael and then with Michael's queen's plan back when there'd been no other choice, they were less than happy campers about the two hundred Wraith who'd been kept on the planet. A few were requesting transfer back to Earth -- unfortunately timed with Woolsey sniffing around -- and it had become a major command problem because it was Carson's ethics they were questioning and Carson was the head of the medical unit and Yoni was the ill-loved deputy head loyal to him. Doctor Weir had rarely had to convene the Ombudsman Committee, but this time there'd been no choice.   
  
"Trust me," Lorne assured him. "Yoni's pissed about the committee meetings. _Really_ pissed. But it's not your face he's superimposing over the targets at the range."  
  
Yoni, unlike the protesting doctors, was not a fan of catch-and-release. He'd been perversely delighted that McKay had wound up on the Ombudsman Committee.   
  
"You know, for all of the times we've done the tough love thing with the lieutenants," Sheppard began, concentration back on the Rubik's cube. "We've been pretty lucky. At least you've been pretty lucky."  
  
And there it was, right out loud. For all of the jokes about Lorne's team and the threatened t-shirts and the mock purple hearts with little green alien faces where the V for valor should be, the only lieutenants to die in Pegasus had been those under Sheppard's command.   
  
"It's not really a matter of luck, sir," Lorne said carefully. Because what the hell could he say? It was no more Sheppard's fault than Beckett's. Not Morrison, not Maguire, and not Aiden Ford. "My team's gone on cakewalks that've gone pear-shaped. This wasn't a cakewalk."  
  
"Yeah, well," Sheppard said, putting the cube back on Lorne's desk. He pushed himself up to standing. "Apparently we're opening a wormhole to send Woolsey back. The IOA couldn't get us to give them our ZPM, so they're settling for draining it dry without moving it."  
  
The sarcasm was thick enough to swim in, but Lorne didn't mind because he didn't disagree. They had wasted lord knows how much energy first sending Doctor Weir back to Earth to face the bullshit there and now they were sending the Woolsey back instead of waiting for the _Daedalus_ to leave?  
  
"I'm going to go talk to Doctor Weir about getting a photo for Morrison sent back when we do," Sheppard went on, annoyance no less deep. The IOA may not like Weir too much, but the SGC still wasn't a fan of Sheppard and he had to know that the IOA was no different. Woolsey had asked Lorne about how he'd felt working for Caldwell and whether he'd be able to do it again.   
  
"I'll see you later, sir." They had a battalion staff meeting at 1500.   
  
"Yeah," Sheppard agreed turning to the door. "Later."


	3. SGA drabble: UA

"Something wrong, sir?"

Suarez continued to dial Atlantis.

"No, Sergeant. Just get us home," Lorne sighed, closing his eyes. He hadn't meant to appear to be supervising.

"I'm dialing the right symbols, sir."

It had been months since they'd gotten lost en route to Ipetia, but the team was still a little sensitive about dialing anywhere. That they were _on_ Ipetia now, looking to get home....

"I don't doubt you," Lorne assured, looking behind him to try and find the lagging half of his team.

"I think the major's going for plausible deniability with the girls surveilling us from the trees," Ortilla explained, giving Lorne a sly look. Lorne smiled back because Ortilla wasn't wrong.

There were four of them, all in their mid-late teens, and they were poorly hidden in the copse of trees almost directly behind the stargate. They were whispering and giggling and making enough noise that they would have been impossible to miss if they'd followed them from the village, so either they'd been lying in wait or there was another route back to the village.

Suarez laughed. "What can I say, sir? We're a bunch of handsome guys." He finished dialing and the wormhole formed, the girls hidden from view by the event horizon. "I'd say they got good taste, but that one lady keeps asking Doctor Safir out."

"Suarez," Ortilla sighed and Lorne was grateful for Ortilla's willingness to handle the discussion. He pulled out his GDO and entered his code. "They're here for the lieutenant. They've been following him around since we got here."

So much for the help. Gillick, thankfully, was trailing behind with Yoni, Reletti, and a couple of the Ipetians and was not yet in earshot.

"Gentlemen?" he asked plaintively, then tapped his radio. "Atlantis, this is Major Lorne. We are ready to return home."

There was a long pause, long enough that he was reaching for his radio again when it crackled to life.

"Lorne?" Sheppard's voice came through clearly. "We've got ourselves a bit of a... situation here. We've instituted a lockdown of the city. Nobody in, nobody out. Can you guys stay where you are for another day? Two if you can swing it?"

Lorne, Suarez, and Ortilla exchanged looks. Reletti, Yoni, and Gillick ran up to the DHD.

"What is going on?" Yoni asked. "Did you do something again?"

Lorne gave Yoni a withering look, but Safir was turned away and didn't see. The others watched Yoni with amused horror.

"I'll have you know that I am the only person who _didn't_ do something," Sheppard retorted, unbothered if not necessarily unoffended.

"We've got it under control, Yoni," Doctor Beckett said soothingly. "The cure is being distributed and there's no lasting medical complications. But the symptoms are a bit _trying_ \--"

"--the cause even more so," Sheppard cut in.

"And we'd rather not risk any new cases," Beckett finished. "I know you'd rather be here to help clean up, but you can take pride in knowing that your protocols for distribution are working wonderfully."

Yoni snorted. "Of course they're working wonderfully. But they shouldn't have been necessary in the first place. _That_ is what I am upset about. What happened?"

Beckett sighed loudly. "I'll tell you all about it when you return."

"Can you at least tell me what sort of contagion it was?"

Lorne looked around. The Ipetians who had accompanied them to the gate were standing at a distance, waiting to see what was obviously wrong.

"A pheromone," Sheppard replied. "Now Lorne, we've got two teams out that have yet to check in. Salker's got his platoon out on M3F-328 digging wells and they should be able to stay over where they are. Osgeny's got a squad escorting a pair of Life Sciences guys somewhere frozen and we're going to redirect them to you. Everyone else is either staying where they are or going to the alpha site."

Lorne didn't really remember who was where today; his team had left the day before and been gone overnight and he had enough trouble keeping that day's schedule in his head, let alone two days in advance. "Understood," he said.

"We should be able to bring everyone home tomorrow," Sheppard went on, "But if we can't, we're going to bounce everyone over to you so that we don't have people scattered around the galaxy. Tell Yuenthea we'll make it up to her."

Yuenthea of the Ipetians would be happy to harbor however many refugees Atlantis had, but Ipetia's bounty wasn't limitless.

"I'm sure it'll be fine, sir," Lorne assured. Because it would be. At least on this end. He was just as concerned and curious as Yoni about what had happened in the city, but obviously nobody was in danger and someone was going to have to exercise restraint and show trust in the city's leadership. And since Yoni wasn't going to, that left him. "We'll check in with you tomorrow."

They had brought a repeater to Ipetia long ago, so radios were still in range when they were at the village and there was no problem with communication.

"Talk to you then," Sheppard agreed. "Atlantis out."

The wormhole closed and Lorne waited for everyone's attention to turn to him. "So we're going to be here for a bit, apparently. Lieutenant, take Staff Sergeant Ortilla and head back to the village and explain what's going on to Yuenthea and that we've got a few more refugees coming. Make it clear that we'll reward Ipetia for their generosity, but don't make it sound like we're hiring them for a bed-and-breakfast."

Gillick was their envoy to Ipetia, as much as they had one -- Lorne's team was only visiting because they'd gotten permission from the SGC to share some alien technology with the Ipetians -- and he'd know what to do. "Aye aye, sir."

Gillick gestured to Ortilla, who started back down the road from the stargate to the village at a jog, and then followed himself. Valarn and a few of the other Ipetians were still waiting at a polite distance, so Gillick would get practice telling their story before they got back to Yuenthea.

"Suarez and Reletti, you two will wait here until Lieutenant Osgeny and his team come through, then you'll escort them to the village," he went on. The village wasn't that far away or that hard to find, but he didn't think Osgeny had been to Ipetia before and he'd already have spent the day shepherding scientists around on the ice.

The two made themselves comfortable off to the side of the stargate -- Ipetia had fairly heavy trade traffic and they didn't want to get in the way -- and that left Lorne with Yoni.

"Come on, Doc," he said. "Let's get back."

Yoni gave one last look at the stargate -- contemplating, no doubt, whether to go back _anyway_ \-- before falling in next to him. Lorne knew that Yoni was still seething about any sort of infection running through the city, which meant that he'd be in an especially good mood until they returned to Atlantis, and Lorne felt a little proud of himself for the self-sacrifice of being Safir's most convenient target.

They weren't more than a couple hundred meters from the stargate when their radios chirped to life.

"Ain't that a trip. We finally miss some shit _because_ we got a lieutenant along."

"Didn't you hear? Pheromones. We missed _sex pollen_."

"How many people are there in Atlantis that you actually _want_ to fuck? It's like you can be hot or smart, but not both."

"Uh, _Teyla_?"

"You and everyone else in Atlantis. Besides, she'd fucking kill you, man."

"She'd be under the same influence."

"She'd still kill you. And if she didn't, Ronon Dex would."

"Life Sciences has a few babes who probably can't dismember you in under a minute. And there's that chick in Chemistry with the long hair and the big rack. And that one Doctor Safir's always hanging out with. And--"

"And what happens if you're in Little Tripoli when it hit? Or Engineering? You wanna get down and dirty with Doctor Zelenka? You think Toussaint's a top or a bottom?"

"Gentlemen? Turn off your radios, please?" Lorne finally stepped in before they got too raunchy. Gillick and Ortilla may have gotten to Yuenthea by now and that's not what he wanted the Ipetians to be overhearing. That's not what _he_ wanted to overhear, but his own personal Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were his chosen cross to bear.

"Fuck," Suarez muttered before the click of his radio turning off transmitted.

"Sorry, sir." Reletti actually sounded contrite.

Lorne looked over at Safir, who was actually grinning. "I'm sure Doctors Brousseau and Clayton would be pleased to know that they are candidates for Atlantis's Babe of the Year Calendar," Yoni said dryly.

* * *

  
"How's it going, Doc?" Lorne asked as he walked into the clinic. Which was far busier than usual with patients on most beds.

Yoni gave him a look that very clearly communicated how stupid a question that was. "The only saving grace of this much traffic -- none of which is actually necessary -- is that everyone knows that I was off-world during L'Affair Lucius and can't bear to look me in the eye. But even embarrassed blushes and self-conscious squirming gets old after a few hours. What do you want?"

"Aspirin," Lorne replied because he hadn't actually come to the clinic to see Yoni. "Lots of aspirin."

He was on Day Two of keeping Sheppard busy enough that he didn't start actively plotting to kill McKay. Not that Lorne was averse to watching Rodney desperately search for escape routes every time Sheppard came into the same room -- what was McKay _thinking_ by giving Sheppard some of the alien roofie and then going out on a mission -- but the self-conscious squirming wasn't restricted to the patients Yoni was seeing during his clinic hours. More than eighty percent of Atlantis's population had been in the city and infected and so Lorne's stint as kindergarten cop was a full-time job until the worst of the embarrassment faded. For once, he wasn't the one stumbling over words when talking with Doctor Weir.

Yoni returned from the medicine cabinets. "Here," he said, holding out a hand full of pill packets with one hand and a dixie cup of water with the other.

Lorne accepted them both gratefully, setting the cup down on the rolling tray Yoni had been using as a desktop and tearing open a packet.

"You figure out how to keep this from happening again?" he asked after he'd finished the water in the cup and crumpled it along with the empty foil packet.

Yoni shrugged. "We're always going to be vulnerable to compromised team members," he said, accepting a tablet that one of the nurses brought over. He tapped away with the stylus for a moment before handing it back. "And I don't think anyone's letting Carson off-world by himself ever again after the last month."

Between the imploded Wraith genetic experimentation and Lucius, Lorne didn't think Beckett _wanted_ to go off-world again, by himself or otherwise.

"The rate of transmission was exactly as it would have been expected," Yoni went on, sitting back down on the tall stool. "The Life Sciences people are having a field day with it, reducing us to bees and bugs. They'll have a journal full of articles out of this. And the preventive protocols are fine. They just got bypassed, first by bringing Lucius back to the city and then by failing to quarantine him pending examination."

Lorne sighed. He knew all about the cascading security failures and had been dealing with them fairly nonstop -- it was most of what kept Sheppard distracted from working on effecting McKay's demise. "Any clue as to why Atlantis didn't take action herself?"

Yoni made an ugly face. "Atlantis's vaunted automatic security is crap and this is just another example of it. It can't stop Wraith, it can't stop chemical threats or non-mechanical viral transmission, and it didn't seem to mind the mosquitoes that Stackhouse's team accidentally brought back last month. If we get invaded by Replicators, then we might be able to use it. Short of that, I have been advocating for months that we stop counting it as a viable city defense."

This, too, was not a new argument. Most of Yoni's appearances at command level staff meetings had to do with public health issues and he'd made his hatred of the automated system clear. "I know."

Yoni nodded once. "On the bright side, Pharmacology thinks they could engineer a reasonable sedative out of the grass. We're not exactly running low, even if the _Daedalus_ is running late with the repairs, but it can get filed under 'In Case We Have to Go Native Again.'"

Almost all of the herb had been collected and burned in a safe place, but Pharmacology and Botany had been allowed to retain samples for study. After McKay's stunt, possession of the stuff outside of those two exceptions was classed as equivalent to any other narcotic and punishable as such.

There was motion behind him and Lorne turned, nodding to Doctor Clayton as she passed.

"Ah, it's Wife Number Ten," Yoni announced happily, getting up. Apparently his clinic shift was over. "Or were you Eleven?"

"Fuck you, Yoni," Clayton sighed, pulling on a white coat. "Pardon my language, Major."

"None required, Doc," Lorne replied. Because Yoni sometimes just asked for it. "I'll catch you guys later. Thanks for the meds."

Looking at his watch as he left, he had a half-hour before the intelligence briefing. In addition to all of his other jobs, Hanzis was the battalion's S2 and ran weekly meetings with all of the senior command staff and off-world team leaders welcome (read "expected") to show up in addition to the officers, whose presence was required. This week's meeting was expected to be very well attended. And very uncomfortable.

He really hoped that his headache was down to a dull roar by then.


	4. SGA: Week Four

"Mother _fucker_!"

The entire room came to a standstill and stared at him. In any other moment, Lorne would have found this extremely funny. As it stood -- or, rather, as it sat on an exam bed with a possibly broken ankle -- he didn't so much care except that his exclamation had also frozen Yoni, who had been taking off his boot so they could x-ray it and had prompted the explosion by turning his foot too far.

"Well, Lorne," Sheppard drawled. "It's good to see that your calming effect on your marines isn't the only influencing going on with your team."

Reletti, Suarez, and Ortilla beamed proudly. Yoni snorted a laugh and went back to unlacing his boot, taking more care this time.

An hour later, the nurses had finished wrapping his not-broken ankle in gauze and padding and whateverthehellelse and he'd been issued a pair of crutches and a couple of painkillers and told that if he got up off the bed before 1400, Yoni would shoot him. Or smack his ankle. So he sat and tried to do work on one of the laptops they kept in the infirmary instead of old magazines and played petty despot by ordering the still-hovering marines to go away and get back to their unit.

Sheppard returned at 1330, retrieved Lorne's crutches from where they'd been propped against a nearby chair, and announced a jailbreak. Yoni wasn't around -- whether he was seeing another patient or had run away lest he be asked to be useful since he was already in the clinic, Lorne didn't know -- and Sheppard talked Doctor Metzinger into letting him go a half-hour early with only an admonition to be careful and an appointment for the next afternoon.

"Thanks," Lorne said as they moved slowly to the transporter.

"I wasn't being completely altruistic," Sheppard admitted a little sheepishly. "I have a favor to ask you and I didn't want to do it in front of others."

Lorne cocked an eyebrow, although the gesture was probably lost in all of the faces he was making as he tried to coordinate his movements with the crutches. He hadn't needed them since high school and he'd lost the rhythm. Nevertheless, there were very few favors that were in Lorne's power to grant to his commanding officer, at least professionally. "What is it?"

"Can I borrow your team?" Sheppard asked.

"My team?" Lorne repeated because that wasn't where he thought this conversation was going. He was protective of his team, but he had spent too long watching Edwards accept and lose members of SG-11 to really think that he had ultimate decision-making powers there.

Sheppard stopped walking and Lorne was relieved because he'd completely forgotten how draining moving around on crutches was. He leaned against the wall and waited.

"It's a favor to Caldwell," Sheppard explained, rolling his eyes. "One of his staff officers is being considered for an SG-team and he asked if we could give him a little test-drive. Like a practice run before he does the real test in our galaxy. I can't exactly say no, but Caldwell knows that, which is part of the reason he's asking, I think."

This time, Lorne was free to frown and have its meaning understood. Atlantis couldn't afford to piss off the captain of the _Daedalus_ , not when that was their only transport between here and Earth -- they'd asked for plenty of things to be shipped aboard her that probably shouldn't have been -- and Caldwell was asking that they return the favor. Sheppard was right -- it wasn't a request they could turn down without a good reason and Caldwell knew it. Whether he was banking on it or whether it was a genuine request that just happened to be unrefusable.... Were in anyone but Caldwell asking Sheppard, Lorne might have thought more positively about it. But while relations between the two men were getting better, this particular case could go either way.

"How does my team figure into it?" He asked instead.

Sheppard gave him the are-you-stupid look normally reserved for especially dull sergeants and McKay. "Because they're _your_ team?"

Lorne lost the fight to keep from smiling. Because it would be that Sheppard thought that leadership of a team was sacrosanct and he was absurdly grateful for his CO and his peculiar way of doing things because the truth of it was that Lorne was in no better position with respect to this request than Sheppard was to Caldwell's. "Okay. Thank you. But why _my_ team?"

The look Sheppard gave him for that was also normally reserved for sergeants and McKay, but it was one of mischievous glee. "I don't think we should give this aspiring explorer a cakewalk and I don't want to throw him to the Wraith."

Sheppard waited a beat for Lorne to see where he was going and then grinned.

"I think I'm supposed to be insulted here," Lorne said wryly. Because he'd never considered _his_ team as the difficult one.

They both nodded at the passing Lieutenant Salker.

"There's entertainment value in sending him out with McKay and Ronon, don't get me wrong," Sheppard went on. "But Teyla would kill me."

" _Yoni_ may kill you," Lorne pointed out. Although Yoni would probably kill _him_ first for agreeing to rent out his team.

"Teyla's harder to avoid," Sheppard reasoned. "All I have to do to avoid Safir is not get hurt."

Lorne bit his tongue on those odds.

"But you're out of commission for a bit and it's a natural fit...." Sheppard waved his hand vaguely.

"And you want to see what Safir and the marines can do to him without leaving marks," Lorne finished. He pushed off the wall and they started toward the transporter again.

"Pretty much," Sheppard agreed. "So, you in?"

He used to be a better person than this. He was fairly sure of it. "If he's taking my mission, can we get him to take my paperwork, too?"

"Give your paperwork to Radner," Sheppard suggested. "He likes paperwork."

Radner handled most of the S1 functions for the battalion. Even if Radner didn't like paperwork, he saw too much of it to be anything but good at it.

"I'll have nothing else to do until my ankle heals," Lorne replied sadly.

* * *

  
"All of my prayers have been answered! Baruch Hashem!"

Yoni sounding that happy was always a suspicious thing, so Lorne craned his neck from where he was sitting on the exam bed waiting for Doctor Abelard to re-wrap his ankle. The swelling had gone down considerably and the pain wasn't nearly as intolerable as it had been yesterday and he had some vague hope of being able to walk around within a week. Maybe.

All he could see was a rush of medical types wheeling someone in on a stretcher and Lorne waited for the crowd to clear so he could see what the hell Yoni was so pleased about because Yoni really did take being a doctor seriously.

"Oh, Christ," the voice of Rodney McKay came through, "Could this day _possibly_ get any worse?"

The medical team got out of the way as Doctors Beckett and Weir appeared and Lorne could see what Rodney was on about and then he wasn't sure whether to be laughing with or laughing at the situation. Because it had to hurt and there would be muscle damage and yet... and yet McKay had gotten shot in the ass with an arrow and it was damned funny.

He was watching McKay and the scene around him -- including Beckett sending Yoni away -- and didn't notice that Doctor Weir had come up to him until she began to speak.

"How are you feeling, Major?" she asked, composed and concerned and not at all looking like her Science Division head had shown up with an arrow in his ass.

"Ankle's much better, ma'am. Thanks," he replied, hoping that he'd covered his surprise. He looked at the clinic door. "Where's Colonel Sheppard?"

Sheppard was good about not getting in the way of the medical teams, but he'd have shown up by now out of concern and friendship. So would have Teyla and Ronon.

Weir sighed and, right then, Lorne knew that his day had just gotten a whole lot more complicated.

"We don't know," she replied. "Rodney thought that they were right behind him, but...."

"But they weren't and now we've got to get a SAR team ready," Lorne finished, looking around for Abelard so that he could get out of the infirmary and back to work. With luck, Sheppard and his team were simply under fire and would be back by the end of the day and in one piece.

"Yeah," Weir agreed.

"I don't _care_!" McKay shrieked from the table they'd transferred him to. "Give me more because it still _hurts_!"

They exchanged a look.

"I'm going to get back to the control room," she said, not making it sound at all like she was fleeing the scene. "May I involve Major.... What _is_ his name?"

Lorne shook his head. He had no idea. "Sure. He can tag along with Osgeny and the ready-room team when they go."

Weir patted his shoulder in gratitude and disappeared as Rodney let loose with a stream of invective that made even Beckett stand back in awe.

Abelard showed up then, waving the new roll of bandage apologetically and got to work re-wrapping his ankle. Lorne tapped his headset. "Lieutenant Murray?"

"Sir?" Murray sounded a little distracted, which mean that the gate room and control room were probably still fussing over whatever had happened when McKay had shown up. There might be damage -- probably was since they'd just painted and Murphy's Law applied in Pegasus -- and the control room scientists tended to need a lot of cosseting when shots (or arrows) came through the wormhole.

"Once you have the gate room under control, tell Lieutenant Osgeny to start prepping for a SAR mission to retrieve Colonel Sheppard and the rest of his team. He'll move out as soon as we get some sort of intel on what's going on over there besides bows and arrows. And he's taking Major Whatsisface with him."

"Aye aye, sir."

Lorne was going to say something else, but then Abelard hit his ankle the wrong way and he had to cut the radio connection or cry into his microphone.

"Sorry," the doctor mumbled.

McKay had been quieted by the time Lorne was handed his crutches and given his freedom. He made his way to the control room, stopping first at the ready room where Osgeny and his men were already strapped into their battle rattle and radiating anticipatory energy. He filled them in on what little he knew -- Sheppard's team had been on a first-contact mission -- and when he thought that they might be leaving.

"Is it true Doctor McKay got shot in the ass with an arrow, sir?" one of the sergeants asked. The rest of the unit looked shamelessly hopeful. Osgeny tried to look very busy with his tablet and stylus.

Lorne didn't even bother to wonder how they all knew. News that good traveled faster than sound.

"Yes," he sighed. "And the first marine to mention it to him will find themselves Atlantis's first corporal."

He backed up the threat by meeting the gaze of any of the marines who looked at him.

Lorne didn't know if it was good or bad that Sheppard and Teyla returned before the SAR team could be mobilized -- he hated waiting and would have sent Osgeny without intel except that what little they _did_ have from McKay involved hostile indigs with vastly superior numbers and lots of weapons. Fearful both of sending more men into an ambush as well as sending heavily-armed marines out to slaughter a pre-industrial society, Weir wouldn't authorize the mission and Lorne had the choice of either talking her into it or pulling a mini-putsch and sending Osgeny anyway. He knew the latter would look exceedingly bad except if Osgeny pulled Sheppard's team out of a firefight, so he had opted to try for persuasion -- at least up until the point where waiting any more would be ridiculous.

And then Sheppard and Teyla showed up on their own, which was good, and then announced what Ronon had done both to get them in trouble and then to free them, which was bad, and then Osgeny and his men (along with Major Whatsisface) went through the stargate anyway. Which made the argument he'd been having with Weir moot. And did nothing for his growing headache.

* * *

  
"There's a certain sense of deja vu here," Yoni announced to no one in particular as he put on latex gloves. "Ronon, you know what to do."

Ronon grumbled groggily and peeled off his shirt, dropping heavily and gracelessly face-down on to the bed as the shirt fell to the floor.

"Careful, big guy," Sheppard warned, hands out so that Ronon didn't slide off of the surface. Ronon muttered something that sounded vaguely appreciative and closed his eyes again. Sheppard patted him awkwardly on the shoulder blade, stooped to retrieve the shirt, and stepped back. He made a face at Lorne that would have been wry amusement if not for the worry.

"All right," Yoni said, turning to face the collected group. "Everyone on the other side of the curtain. This is an exam, not entertainment."

"No, that would've been getting him down here," Ortilla replied, stepping back along with the others and rolling his shoulder. With Sheppard's team in the field, Lorne's had been raised to on-call status, which had proven fortunate because that meant that they had been easily able to find Ortilla, one of the few men in Atlantis big enough to help guide the semi-conscious Ronon Dex down to the infirmary after he'd fought the gurney brought for him.

Yoni pulled the curtain around the bed and the rest of them had nothing else to do except wait. Sheppard hopped up on to the nearest bed and Lorne was given dirty looks by Reletti and Suarez until he sat down on one of the stools.

"What was Sateda like, sir?" Suarez asked after everyone else had gotten settled. Beckett had taken McKay off to get looked at, although Lorne sort of suspected that Beckett wanted to get himself looked at as well, and Teyla was sitting on another stool while the marines stood.

"Looked kind of like home," Sheppard said after a pause. "Bombed out and reduced to rubble and silt in places, but modern -- by our standards, at least. They could have shot the big finale to an action movie there and nobody would have been the wiser."

From what little they'd heard about what had happened, it sounded like they _had_ shot an action movie there.

The nurse working with Yoni came out from behind the curtain and moved past them, quickly returning with a rolling tray laden with an IV bag, gauze, tape, syringes, bottles, and a suturing kit. They could hear Yoni speaking to the nurse, but not loud enough for any words to be clear.

"He'll be okay?" Ortilla asked.

Sheppard sighed and shrugged. "Ronon's tough. He'll be okay eventually."

"I don't know if I'd be able to do it," Reletti said quietly after they'd all fallen silent. "To be a POW for seven years -- and not the Red Cross-visiting kind -- and then to finally get free and then for it to happen all over again? I mean, I'd like to think that I could handle it, but...."

Lorne looked over at Reletti, half-lost in thought. It hadn't been that long since they'd been captured by the Genii to be lab rats, but Reletti didn't seem to be counting that. Reletti had come through the experience just fine, they all had, but Lorne didn't believe for a moment that he was the only one who sometimes woke up sweating from dreams where Sheppard had never found them.

"Long ago, Ronon made a choice to never give up," Teyla said and Lorne focused on her and away from vague nightmares. "I do not think that he would be able to do so even if he wanted to."

"Anyone who's sparred with him could tell you that," Suarez agreed. "Hell, anyone who's been on the chow line with him could tell you that."

Grins all around because they'd all seen Ronon snarl his way to the last of something in the commissary.

"Ortilla? Reletti?" Yoni called out from behind the curtain. "Come here, please?"

Once they joined Yoni, grunts and sounds of lifting and shifting could be heard and then apparently Ronon was turned over because the two marines emerged a moment later looking amused and a little flushed from the exertion.

Suarez said something to them, but Lorne didn't hear what it was because his radio activated at the same time. "Colonel Sheppard? Major Lorne?"

"What is it, Lieutenant?" Sheppard answered.

"Captain Handzis is back from M1A-447, sir," Lieutenant Eriksson, gate room officer this watch, replied. "He wants to know if you'd like to push back the meeting."

Lorne looked at his watch. He hadn't realized how late it had gotten. He then looked at Sheppard, who was looking at him.

"I'll go," he offered. He doubted Handzis, who handled most of their intel gathering, would have even bothered to ask unless he'd brought back something of interest.

Sheppard nodded thanks. "Major Lorne is on his way," Sheppard told Eriksson.

Lorne felt like an old man as Ortilla and Suarez helped him stand and then hovered until he'd balanced on his crutches and taken a few steps without falling over.

"Should I invite Major.... " he trailed off because he _still_ didn't know the guy's name and hadn't been close enough to him to read the nameplate.

Sheppard made a face. "The _Daedalus_ is leaving soon. I'm sure he's got practice with meetings."

Lorne was most of the way out of the infirmary when he heard Reletti speak.

"You don't know his name, either, do you, sir?"


	5. SGA: 3x05 Drabble

  
"Gunny?"

"What is it, Garrotte?"

"Do you see that? The orange light? That don't look like any astronomy thing. Not even for Pegasus."

"Fuck. "

* * *

  
This wasn't the first time Doctor Weir had gone off-world overnight and it wouldn't be the last. But that didn't mean that an undercurrent of concern wasn't lapping persistently at the command-and-control element of Atlantis. The transfer of authority went smoothly because of practice -- McKay and Sheppard were absent often enough and most of them didn't know what Weir actually did with her time, so there was no place to put a power vacuum -- but there was a certain _something_ that only manifested when Weir was off with a team on missions. Especially to visit advanced societies.

For a while Hanzis had been crafting a theory about it, some corollary of Murphy's Law that calculated a society's technological aptitude versus their likelihood of wanting to do harm to the Atlantis expedition. He'd stopped, however, when the equations had been reduced to jacking up the danger level to "high" if the society in question could do more than build a trebuchet. The abandonment was probably for the best because the data point from last month's imprisonment of Sheppard's team at the hands of a bows-and-arrows society would have only further damaged morale.

With most of Atlantis's command off to visit a world that apparently had access to Ancient technology, however, it didn't matter what the state of Hanzis's theory was. Personnel who didn't need to linger in the control room did, the marines were more diligent than gate duty normally warranted, and while nobody said anything out loud, the anticipation of waiting for the other shoe to drop was almost palpable. That they could actually be with Ancients right now didn't ease fears any -- Daniel Jackson's revelation about the Ancient who'd co-opted their data interface had only reinforced the already generally accepted belief that the Ancients were hardly lofty and less than benevolent.

Lorne put down his pen and rubbed at his face. There wasn't a soul in Atlantis who could begrudge him going to bed; he'd been up for twenty hours, settled two minor and one not-so-minor dispute (what _was_ it with the scientists acting out when McKay was away?), and caught up on all of the outstanding paperwork before starting on Sheppard's backlog as well. Polito, officer of the watch, was sitting at the table in the corner of the room doing his own work and waiting for Lorne to vacate the desk.

He had re-located to the Military Commander's Office (ironically named, of course, because Sheppard had never used the place) so that he could be within easy reach for control room personnel, but there'd been no need since Sheppard's team had left the day before. No official need, at least. But he knew that everyone felt a little better when they could _see_ the leadership of Atlantis. And, for better or for worse, the effective leadership was him right now since Beckett and Zelenka wanted nothing to do with day-to-day operations.

Accepting that he'd be just as useless as they were to assuring the daily functioning of the city unless he got some sleep, Lorne stood up and was about to tell Polito that he was retiring for the night when his radio came to life.

"Captain Polito? We've got an incoming aircraft heading straight for the city," Lieutenant Patchok said. "Scanners say it's not Wraith, but they don't know what it is and they're not answering any hails."

Polito stood up and looked at Lorne, frowning. "Scramble the jumpers for intercept, Lieutenant, and try to figure out what its intentions are before we blow it out of the sky."

"Aye aye, sir."

"How far away is it?" Lorne asked as he moved around the desk and toward the door, Polito following. They ran down the concourse and Lorne could see the bustle of the control room in crisis mode, Patchok an island of stillness in the middle of things.

"It's still in space," Patchok said as they got to the control room, gesturing with one hand to the plasma screen along the back wall.

"It hasn't breached atmosphere yet," the engineer manning the sensor elaborated. Lorne didn't know her name, nor the names of any of the other scientists in the room. "But it's on a direct course for Atlantis. Whatever it is, it knows exactly where we are."

"ETA?" Polito asked as he crossed the room to look at the display. "And any chance that it'll burn when it hits atmo?"

"At current course and speed? About twenty minutes until it breaches atmosphere and about five from there until it's directly on top of us," the engineer replied.

"And no on the burning-up," another engineer added from the console that controlled local sensors. "Gunnery Sergeant Haumann reported a sighting of what he thought was an explosion in space and the aircraft was detected from that area shortly thereafter. If it could survive an explosion that could be seen without magnification, then it probably won't be affected."

"Unless it was a hyperspace window opening," Zelenka said as he emerged from the hallway across the room. "But we don't have that kind of luck."

"Great," Lorne muttered, watching Zelenka cross over to the long-range sensors, giving instructions to the scientists that he passed. "Where are the jumpers?"

"Jumper Bay, this is Flight," the sergeant at the console said into his radio. "What is your status?"

"Activate the ready-room team," Polito told Patchok. "And recall Major Lorne's and Staff Sergeant Stackhouse's teams. Full gear for everyone."

Patchok repeated the commands into his radio. Lorne knew that for his own team it was simply a matter of finding Yoni -- Ortilla, Suarez, and Reletti were in Patchok's platoon and were thus already armed and ready.

"Flight, this is Jumper Bay," an accented voice announced. "Jumpers Two and Five are away."

"Lieutenant, get Doctor Beckett here," Lorne said. "Doctor Zelenka, is there any chance we can identify this aircraft before the jumpers get close enough to shoot it down? Can we be sure that it's not a Wraith ship?"

It's not that he didn't trust whichever lieutenants were flying, but he'd rather not burden them with the choice of whether to fire or not. There weren't many civilizations in Pegasus with space flight capabilities -- and everyone doubted that the Olesians were still around -- but with the Ori having built a supergate to the Milky Way and the rogue SG-1 team that had hijacked the _Prometheus_ , anything was possible, friendly or really not.

"It's not Wraith," Zelenka replied, not looking up from the laptop he'd commandeered. "After the siege, we fine-tuned the sensors. It's a ship, but it's not a Wraith ship."

Relative quiet fell in the control room as the engineers focused on their tasks and the officers watched. For all that Zelenka shamelessly shirked all command responsibilities during peaceful times, he was effective and efficient now, issuing spare orders and moving purposefully from station to station to his laptop.

Hearing a rustling behind him, Lorne turned around to see Ortilla, Suarez, and Reletti waiting outside the control room. Ortilla gave him a ironic smile when Lorne met his gaze. Just another night of fun.

"Flight, this is Jumper Two," Lieutenant Paik's voice came through over the speakers. "I have our bogey on my screen. It's flying straight as an arrow and right for the city. I'm trying all radio frequencies, but I don't think I'm close enough yet."

"Copy, Jumper Two," the flight sergeant replied. "Let us know if you can make contact or an ID."

Lorne could hear the hushed sound of the north door to the gate room opening and the anything-but-hushed noise of a platoon of marines moving into the gate room. Looking down, he could see Gillick gesturing his men into position out of the way from Patchok's guard teams and then making for the staircase. Gillick came up the stairs and around to the gate room, nodding at Lorne before going to stand by Patchok.

"Ten minutes to intercept," the engineer at the radar console reported.

There was nothing to do but wait and the waiting was miserable. Lorne felt helpless and knew that the marines felt the same way, all of them with nothing to do until the scientists figured out what was happening and translated it into terms that they could understand. Stackhouse's team materialized by Ortilla and Beckett arrived, still in his lab coat. Yoni showed up wearing his fatigues and gear and carrying Lorne's tac vest and an extra P-90, handing them off and then joining the lieutenants on the tiny balcony because the control room was getting crowded.

"Flight," Paik's voice was startling in the quiet tension. "My sensors have identified our bogey as another _jumper_."

Incredulous murmuring in the control room. "Are you sure, Lieutenant?" Lorne asked.

"Yes, sir," he replied, sounding as disbelieving as the rest of them. "As much as I can be without visual confirmation. I'm close enough to scan the ship and it's definitely shaped like a puddle jumper."

"How is that possible?" Polito looked mystified.

"The planet Colonel Sheppard's team is visiting has Ancient technology," Zelenka pointed out as he moved from his laptop to the short-range sensor console. "If they have PDAs, then it stands to reason that they might have jumpers. Especially if they _are_ Ancients."

"But how far away are they?" Lorne asked, because he didn't think that their mystery civilization was actually populated by Ancients. "Wasn't that planet on the other end of the galaxy? It'd have taken _light years_ for a jumper to get from there to here."

"That orange light could have been a hyperspace window," Zelenka reminded them. "Different mechanism, different visual effect."

The holographic display on the center screen suddenly changed and a puddle jumper's outline was visible. It wasn't the one on approach to Atlantis -- their video sensors didn't go that far out -- but it could be the feed from Paik's jumper.

"Puddle jumpers don't have hyperspace abilities," Beckett pointed out. Lorne had almost forgotten that he was there. "Isn't that how we nearly lost Colonel Sheppard with the Hive ship the other month?"

"Our jumpers don't," Zelenka agreed, returning to his laptop and typing furiously. "But we know that the Ancients had puddle jumpers that could travel through time and we ourselves have experimented with adding hyperspace capability to the X-302 fighter."

"Five minutes to intercept."

Lorne turned to Gillick. "Get your men to the transporter closest to the jumper bay. Friendly or not, if that ship touches down, I want you there to greet it."

"Aye aye, sir," Gillick replied, starting toward the entryway to the control room.

"Reletti," Lorne went on, "go with them in case they need to take a jumper to get there."

The two on-call pilots were already airborne and neither he nor Sheppard were available to fly. There should be more pilots getting ready, but the most experienced ones would need to be prepared for possible air combat and Reletti was a good enough pilot to fly a transport jumper.

Reletti followed Gillick down the stairs, Ortilla and Suarez watching with both envy and concern.

"Three minutes to intercept."

"Flight, it's definitely a puddle jumper," Paik reported over the speakers. "It's almost identical to one of ours. And if they're responding to my comm, it's not on any frequency we can get."

"Copy that, Jumper Two," Lorne said. "Stay on radio, please."

With Gillick's marines gone from the gate room, the only noise was the murmuring bustle of the engineers at the consoles and Paik's voice over the speakers as he tried to make contact with the approaching jumper and coordinated with Lieutenant Eriksson, who was flying Jumper Five. Paik had been a naval aviator before Atlantis and knew the protocols, how to warn and when to threaten.

"One minute to intercept."

"Lieutenants, you are cleared hot," Lorne said, feeling the gravity of the situation settle squarely in his chest. He'd done a stint as a forward air controller and while the experience had been worthwhile, the near-chronic heartburn hadn't been nearly as much fun. This sort of air control, where he could see neither their own aircraft nor the target, was the hardest and the most prone to bad mistakes and friendly fire. "Don't fire unless fired upon and try to escort the jumper to the south pier."

The south pier was their de facto landing strip because of its distance from buildings of importance and proximity to a transporter. Gillick could get his men there and in position well in advance of a landing.

"Intercept in ten... nine... eight... seven... six... five... four... three... two... one.... Engagement."

Jumpers were an all-or-nothing combat element -- they were armed with a shield and drone weapons and nothing in the way of anything that could fire a warning shot. They weren't really meant for combat flying and he and Sheppard had been asking for a complement of X-302s from the start. The request was as likely to be met as the one for more drone weapons.

In the control room, Lorne and the others watched as the three jumpers, reduced to two blue dots and a red one, maneuvered on the screen. Paik and Eriksson were moving to bracket the other jumper and force it to land.

"The rear hatch is gone," Eriksson exclaimed as he moved into position, sounding both amused and surprised. "Whoever's left is in the cockpit."

If everything aft of the bulkhead was gone, then the chance of it being the vanguard of attacking force was a little less -- or, at least, of it being an _effective_ vanguard.

"I'm going to move up a little and see if I can't get visual contact with the pilot," Paik said. "Radio's obviously not working."

Lorne looked over at Polito, who was watching the display, and then to Yoni, who gave him a tight shrug. Zelenka was watching his laptop and Beckett, looking vaguely seasick, was leaning up against the far wall by the catwalk to Doctor Weir's office. Patchok, standing next to Yoni, was half-turned so that he could see both the display and his men in the the gate room below.

"Holy fuck!" Paik cried out and everyone's head turned to the screen. "It's Colonel Sheppard and Doctor McKay!"

A collective sigh of relief, but Lorne knew that the crisis wasn't over quite yet. "Get them to the south pier, Lieutenant," he ordered. "Lieutenant Gillick, if you could please meet them there."

"Why not the jumper bay?" Beckett asked, still looking a little pale.

"Because we don't know if they're alone or if they're compromised, sir," Polito answered before Lorne could. Beckett flushed and hung his head, but Lorne knew that Polito hadn't meant it as a rebuke and instead turned to Yoni and gestured with his head.

"Going," Yoni agreed. He snapped loudly twice and made a come-along motion when he'd gotten Ortilla's and Suarez's attention. The two marines navigated through the crowded control room to join Yoni on the way to the infirmary and then to the pier.

It was ten minutes before Sheppard's jumper landed on the south pier, twenty minutes before the ship was deemed safe by Gillick, and an hour before Yoni cleared Sheppard's team and Doctor Weir for entrance back into the city. It was three hours before all of the emergency codes for the city were changed -- the full debrief was scheduled for the next day (later that day; it was already after midnight), but Sheppard had insisted on starting precautionary measures that shouldn't wait until then.

It was going on dawn before Lorne actually got back to his quarters and he debated just taking a shower and going back to work; he had a full morning scheduled and that was before he had found out that most of Atlantis's command element had been forcefully and thoroughly interrogated by _Replicators_ (oh, was the SGC going to _love_ this databurst) intent on destroying the city.

But that dedicated plan of action was rendered moot when he fell asleep on his bed, still dressed, after sitting down to take off his boots.

 

* * *


	6. SGA episode drabble 3x06

He wakes up when his radio chirps. It takes him a couple of seconds to realize that he doesn't have to reach for the earpiece because it's _still in his ear_.

"Lorne," he answers automatically, sleep-slurred and making no pretense of being in a position to comprehend the response.

Sheppard's already telling him that they've got a problem before he realizes that he'd never finished undressing from the night before. He never really started, truthfully, getting as far as both boots and one sock before he'd apparently passed out.

He's undressed, showered and shaved, re-dressed, and in the infirmary in fifteen minutes. He looks like crap, he needs caffeine badly enough that he'd risk a court-martial to shoot someone for their coffee, but at least he's clean.

He follows the noise and the helpful gestures of slightly traumatized marines to the quarantine room. Yoni is already there, unshaven and in scrubs, ordering people around with even less patience and more vitriol than usual. It's kind of impressive, actually, in that way that watching the PBS documentaries with leopards chasing down gazelles always are. Yoni's barking at _Beckett_ when Lorne enters the room and Sheppard yanks him back so as to stay out of the path of Yoni's fire.

Lorne wonders if Sheppard wants him there to keep the good doctor from killing anyone, but Sheppard is letting Yoni claw his way through the medical staff with no qualms and it's not until three of them scurry away to retrieve equipment that Lorne sees why: it's Doctor Weir on the bed, flushed and breathing with rasping gasps that he can hear across the room and over the bustle of the quarantine room.

They don't know what's wrong, but she's only hours back from being (held prisoner) off-world and so Yoni's convinced that it has something to do with the Asurans even though Sheppard seems fine and McKay, Ronon, and Teyla are being examined off in the corner. Which explains part of Yoni's pissiness, Lorne figures, because Yoni is always a bitch when someone gets sick from being off-world and it's not caught immediately. That the five returnees have had contact with all of the extended Atlantis command -- and a portion of the rest of Atlantis's population -- and may have infected lord-knows-how-many others and Yoni himself was the one to do the initial exams.... It's going to be some rough sledding until this is over.

Lorne doesn't fight when they come for his blood; he is already on the radio doing Yoni's bidding by getting Lieutenant Gillick to gather his platoon so that they can be tested. The good news is that he's caught them before breakfast and thus before they've hit the commissary. The bad news is that they were already at PT and they might have to quarantine Little Tripoli. And Gillick sounds like he's hacking up a lung.

The isolation chamber for Doctor Weir is set up, Lorne and Sheppard's team are cleared of infection, and things may be looking up when Doctor Biro comes running in, brushes past orderlies and medical personnel alike to present Yoni with a tablet.

Yoni takes one look at it, curses eloquently, and snaps his fingers loudly to get Sheppard's attention. "Put the city on lockdown. Now," he orders, then turns to Beckett, showing him the tablet. "You've got Weir, I'll get the rest of the city."

"What's going on?" Sheppard asks, an angry edge to his impatience. He grabs Yoni's elbow as Yoni passes on his way to the door.

"Weir's been infected with a nanovirus," Yoni tells him and it's a sign of how worried Yoni is that he's not even taking a moment to remind Sheppard of the last one. "Shut down the city."

Sheppard does, ordering an immediate lockdown that is backed up with suspiciously efficient cooperation from Atlantis herself. Yoni disappears, muttering about vectors and idiots and the tension in the room drops noticeably once he goes away.

Nevertheless, the next hour passes with aching slowness. All of their blood is re-checked and they go through the Ancient body scan, just in case the nanovirus is dormant in any of them. They're all cleared again and Doctor Abelard departs for Little Tripoli to test Lorne's marines as well as Gillick and his platoon.

Free to leave, Lorne does. Sheppard's not going to be budging from Weir's side any time soon and someone needs to be in the control room and handling the day-to-day business of Atlantis. That meetings and presentations are cancelled are obvious; that off-world activity is suspended is less so, depending on the mission. The marines know that training exercises are off, but the scientists will show various degrees of perceptiveness when it comes to their scientific explorations. One or two will react with first befuddlement and then anger at the news that their day trip has been postponed. (He's prepared for it -- on a bad day at the SGC, you could hear General Hammond reaming out some science team from a floor away, telling them that the Goa'uld were trying to sabotage the stargate and no, they _weren't_ going to P3X-772 to collect space daisies.)

He'd gotten waylaid by answering two dozen messages -- the lockdown is only physical; with IM the leading form of communication in Atlantis, the news will spread faster than any virus would -- and formulating a city-wide message to explain the situation without starting a panic. So he's still going over the mission calendar for the day when Sheppard appears. Bearing real coffee from the medical suites and fake food from the supply room, which under the circumstances is acceptable because it beats the reverse. The cheese-and-veggie omelet MRE is pretty much all breakfast food anyway and even the MRE elves can't wreck hash browns and bacon too badly.

"How's it going in there?" Lorne asks after they've eaten. Sheppard has traded him his jam, crackers, and the apple cider out of the accessory pack for his cinammon scone. Lorne adds Sheppard's to his own to save for later; he doesn't think he's going to be getting to the commissary any time today.

"Safir's trying to use the last nanovirus to get a leg up on this one," Sheppard replies, fiddling with the matches from the MRE accessory kit. "They've got Doctor Weir all hooked up to scanners and computers and who-the-hell-else-knows-what. She's getting worse."

Lorne sips his coffee because there's nothing really to say to that. "Everyone else is turning up clean?" he asks instead.

Sheppard nods. "Your boys are fine and Abelard's still working through Gillick's platoon, but so far everyone's okay there. Gillick's just got a chest cold. Carson said it was probably the same thing that waylaid most of Chemistry the other week, but I don't know why a marine would pick up something from the geek squad. He hasn't been babysitting recently."

Lorne raises an eyebrow. Gillick is a strapping, good-natured Minnesota farmboy and even if he's completely unaware of its draw, most women aren't.

"Please tell me that I'm not going to have to start chaperoning my lieutenants around Atlantis," Sheppard sighs.

The light moment is just that -- a moment -- when their radios activate. Weir is getting worse still and Yoni's initial batch of tests are all spectacular failures. Which means that Sheppard is on his way back to the quarantine room and Yoni is back to being something between irascible and terrifying.

Since it's looking more and more like the only affected party is Doctor Weir, Lorne authorizes the replacement of Patchok's platoon, which has been on since midnight and is pretty close to falling over at their various posts. Nobody's ever on nights long enough to get used to it and they're hours overdue for relief. Salker takes over as gate room officer and the two platoons effect the switch with a relative silence that's as indicative as anything else that everyone knows and is worried.

Not wanting to get underfoot in the medical suites, Lorne stays in the military commander's office and works. For all that he hates living life attached to a laptop, the advantage is that he can do most of his tasks from any computer and not need too much from his desk or office. Not that he's about to confess to appreciating it; they'd take away his printer. With everyone else in Atlantis trapped where they are, the flow of business of the city is both compressed and stretched out -- those quarantined in the labs are being extra productive with no distraction available in the form of escape, more than compensating for the ones trapped in the commissary or in their quarters. All in all, it's a lot like the crappy work he hated doing as a staff officer, the driving impetus to sign up for consideration for a covert assignment that turned out to be the Stargate Program. (They had him at "no paperwork.")

Just when he's losing the fight with himself to stick to the task at hand and not go out to the control room to chat with Salker and the techs probably asleep at their console, Yoni shows up.

"What are you doing here?" Lorne asks, because he's had his radio on and knows that nothing has changed in the last few hours.

Yoni shrugs and drops heavily into the chair across from his desk. "Carson told me to take a walk," he admits when Lorne continues to watch and wait. "I made one of the biomedical engineers cry."

Lorne can't help but chuckle. The ironic thing is that, under the circumstances, he's willing to bet that Yoni did it completely unintentionally. As opposed to the other times when Yoni's trying to drive people from his presence by any means necessary.

"Did you get to sleep last night?" he asks. Yoni is looking ragged and worn and, now that he is sitting down and not radiating anger, like he's about to pass out.

"I went back to my office after finishing with Sheppard's team," Yoni admits, rubbing his eyes. Lorne tosses one of the cracker packs at him, hitting him in the forehead. Yoni opens it without comment, which is proof enough of how tired he is. "The Three Stooges are on third shift this week, so we're not going anywhere and the labs would be empty. Better to sleep when everyone else is there."

Yoni eats the crackers with his usual fastidiousness, balling the wrapper in his hand when he's done. "This Replicator virus is far more ingenious than the one from last year," he says, rolling his neck. Lorne can hear the pop from where he's sitting. "They are both ultimately Ancient in design, at least that is what the biomeds are saying, but the behavior is nothing alike. That one was supposed to kill humans, but this one... it's like it's sitting there, waiting for something. It could be replicating far faster than it is, but it's not. It could have killed Weir three hours ago."

"That's a good thing, right?"

Yoni shakes his head. "I don't know. On the one hand, it gives us more time to try for a cure. On the other, whatever its purpose is, it's probably a helluva lot more dangerous than simply killing Elizabeth Weir."

"A timebomb," Lorne says. Yoni nods agreement. "They want to destroy Atlantis."

"They just might," Yoni says, standing. "I can't sit. I'll fall asleep."

Lorne watches him wander out of the office and back toward the medical suite.

It's an hour later and Lorne has given up and gone to bother Salker when he hears Beckett yelling at Sheppard about breaking quarantine and then there's just a lot of confused talking over each other as Weir's vital signs appear to be spiking upward and Sheppard is dragged off to get tested _again_ and Lorne's pretty sure Yoni's going to kill Sheppard this time, even though whatever he did seems to have worked.

The last thing Lorne does before going off to the medical suites is allow Salker to lift the city-wide quarantine. He stops by to see Weir, who is exhausted and hyper all at once as she talks to the assembled group. He then goes across the hall to make sure that Yoni hasn't actually killed Sheppard. Yoni hasn't -- has already disappeared, in fact -- and Sheppard is not sporting any new visible bruising. Comfortable that he can hand the city back to its caretakers, he takes off his radio and goes back to his quarters.

This time, he gets both socks off before falling asleep in his uniform.


	7. SGA: 3x07

  
Atlantis was whispering in his bones, a low hum he could feel and not hear. It was soothing and innocuous and just a presence that didn't intrude, which was more than he could say for pretty much everything else in Atlantis right now.

He'd accepted the welcoming committee because it was easier to do so than not and because he was genuinely, deeply, _absolutely_ happy to be home. And, especially, because the people he cared about needed to see him. Elizabeth needed reinforcement that she had made the right decision and Rodney, Teyla, and Ronon needed to see him in one piece and know that their efforts had been taken for what they were -- friendship in action. He'd shaken Gillick's hand and told him and his marines that they'd done a good job and he'd patted Carson on the back and apologized for not needing medical attention. He'd been through something near to this before, once upon a time in another galaxy and more recently in this one, and he understood how much a little gesture from him could mean to everyone else. They needed time with him even more than he needed time with himself, and so he stayed.

But after a while, once the buzz of anxiety had faded into something that could be squinted at and called relief, he'd escaped, muttering something about being tired and there'd been a lot of knowing nods and he'd gone off to his quarters. And then promptly back out again once he'd showered and changed because he couldn't stand to be in a room so small and so dark, even if his room was not very small and even if Atlantis could turn it as bright as the desert at noon.

He'd ended up in one of the spires at a far edge of the city, the top of a building that they'd explored and not moved into. The Social Sciences folks thought it had once been a conservatory and the Asurans had used it for that purpose as well, but the only music in Atlantis came from iPods, portable speakers, and the room off of the seventeenth-floor lounge where a collection of scientists had started a chamber music society, so they'd done nothing with the building as of yet. It was a beautiful building, somehow left untouched by the Wraith assaults, with a sort of flowing, lyrical architecture that made you wonder why you needed a Ph.D to figure out that the place had been for music.

Like everywhere else in the city, it had balconies that looked out on to the ocean and he'd settled on one of them, sitting on the ground with his back against what had once probably been a planter but was now just a giant empty tub. He watched the stars, picking out the constellations that he'd gotten from the Ancient database and watching the sun set and the moon rise. It was warmish and windy and so quiet and if he closed his eyes, he felt almost a part of the sky.

"Not a bad view, sir," a familiar voice said from behind him. "Probably a little nicer during the day."

He opened his eyes to see Lorne standing, leaning in the doorway. Waiting to see if he wanted company because while Elizabeth had undoubtedly sent him out on the search, Lorne was perfectly okay with turning around and reporting back that his CO was fine and would be in when he was ready.

He gestured for Lorne to join him; he'd come out here not because he needed to be alone, but because he needed to not feel smothered and there had been very little available between those two extremes. But Lorne had missed all of the excitement and his anxiety and relief would be largely academic. Lorne had done his time as a Genii prisoner and understood in a way that nobody else in Atlantis did that Malthusa had been so much harder to bear than this had been for reasons that went far beyond physical pain. It's one thing when it's just you; it's a completely different affair when you're responsible for the safety of others.

"Here," Lorne said, tossing him a small plastic bottle and keeping one for himself. He caught it and looked at the label in the moonlight. It said that it was LSA, but there was no reason for Lorne to be carrying bottles of machine gun lubricant and they didn't store their LSA in a freezer. Lorne dropped down a couple of feet away so that he could put his back to another empty planter. "Compliments of the Three Wise Men."

Captains Polito, Radner, and Hanzis did many things that John was pretty sure were solely for the purpose of confounding their Air Force superior officers, but he was also fairly sure that they drew the line at gifting them with lube. John looked over at Lorne. "What is this?"

"Athosian firewater." Lorne unscrewed the cap of his bottle. "More precisely, the hooch we brought back from the mainland last time we were out there for a barbecue."

John grinned. That must have been almost a year ago; usually one of them stayed behind during big shindigs on the mainland. "And the marines haven't stumbled across it yet?"

He unscrewed the cap and took a swig. Stuff was far smoother than homemade hooch had any right to be, a quality amplified by the cold, and tasted a little like rosemary. He wasn't a big drinker, certainly not in Atlantis when he could be called to duty at any hour, but he had the distinct feeling that nobody was going to be pinging him for anything short of a Wraith invasion for the next few days.

"Wherever the Wise Men are hiding it, the marines haven't gotten to it," Lorne confirmed, taking a sip himself. "They're still trying to make beer in the back of one of the video rooms in Little Tripoli."

Very enterprising, their marines. Not always the brightest bulbs -- the network of white plastic tubs and the bottle capping tool were pretty much dead giveaways, even if they tried to pass off the latter as a training tool -- but it kept them out of more serious trouble.

"So how was your day?" John asked, closing his eyes as the breeze picked up a little.

"Fifteen hours in a puddle jumper with my team and Doctors Takahashi, Williams, and Otkharev," Lorne began, "Three days on the planet, and then sixteen hours back because I made Reletti fly us back and he drives like my grandmother. Except he can see over the steering wheel."

"So if it wasn't completely inappropriate, you'd be making torture jokes right now," John said, opening his eyes and taking another sip. Even in his current disassociated state, where the concerns of a battalion and a city seemed a little unimportant, he could appreciate the degree of unpleasantness Lorne had endured. Because the mission had sounded like sheer, unmitigated hell from the moment he and Lorne had realized that they had no choice but to approve it and that it would have to be one of them who went. John joked to himself that he'd have recovered from today's adventure when he could tell Lorne that he wouldn't trade places.

"Yeah, you pretty much pulled the rug out from under my bitch session," Lorne agreed.

"Wasn't anything you could have done," John said. He'd been repeating variations on the same thing all afternoon.

"I know that," Lorne agreed, sounding like he meant it. "But I'd rather have been doing something than hearing about it from fourteen hours away."

"Next time," John promised.

Lorne sighed. "Yeah." He took a long drink. "Unless we both get caught again and have to overthrow another country before the marines can bail us out."

"You're supposed to tell me that hopefully there won't be a next time," John prompted.

"How many hours have you been back?" Lorne asked wryly. "Haven't you gotten enough of the empty platitude bullshit for the day?"

John chuckled in spite of himself.

"I mean, don't get me wrong," Lorne went on, "I hope that none of us ever get in trouble again. But I asked Santa for more drone weapons and all I got was extra ketchup, so I'd rather aim for wishes that can be filled."

"NORAD's in league with Santa, the SGC's under NORAD, ergo no drone weapons," John replied. "Should've asked for a new sled."

Lorne grinned at him.

They were quiet then, letting the breeze ruffle their hair and enjoying the peace. John felt a little more comfortable in his skin than he had earlier, he realized. Maybe it was that the adrenaline edge from whatever the Wraith (and he'd never named the guy, which was probably for the best because he'd killed the ones he'd named) had done to him was finally gone. Or maybe it was that the realization that he was safe and alive was finally sinking in. Or maybe it was the Athosian hooch. Or talking to Lorne, who offered knowing sympathy and no cloying pity. Or maybe he was just getting good at collecting all of his fears and feelings and tamping them down under a layer of normalcy. Or all of the above. Or none of it.

"How goosed was Doctor Weir that she sent you after me?" John asked.

Lorne shrugged, not bothering to deny anything. "Everyone always spazzes a bit when Atlantis says you're not in the city," he replied. "When you've just come back from being kidnapped, tortured, fed upon by a Wraith, and reanimated by said Wraith, and _then_ Atlantis plays dumb, well...."

John got the picture. "How'd you find me?" Because this hadn't been a place he'd hidden out before and while Lorne's tracking abilities were a little scary at times, this should've been close to bulletproof.

"You came up on the HUD when we were flying in," Lorne admitted, smiling broadly. "Snowball didn't know that she wasn't supposed to know where you were."

John shook his head. Saved by a jumper and busted by one all in the same day.

"Think this invisibility will last for a couple of days?"

"I think Atlantis is scared of Heightmeyer," Lorne replied, putting the cap on his bottle. "If that's what you're hoping for."

John sighed. "I am going to be spending far too much time with that woman." He liked Heightmeyer personally, approved of her professional means and methods as far as he'd had to deal with them as both someone who ordered men to see her and as an occasional participant, and still dreaded the fact that he wasn't getting out of this experience without weeks of therapy sessions.

"And I'm going to be doing all of your paperwork while you do," Lorne pointed out.

"I appreciate it," John replied. Because he did.

"Remind me of that later," Lorne said. He stood up and stretched. Sixteen hours in a puddle jumper twisted you in ways that didn't come undone in a few hours out of it. Certainly not when you were on the far side of thirty. "And now that I've made sure you're not in need of intervention, I'm off to go find Yoni, who probably is."

John smiled. "Goodnight, Major."

"Goodnight, sir." He headed for the door. "Glad you're back."

"Me, too."

* * *


	8. 3x08

  
"Got a few?"

Lorne looked up to see Sheppard standing in the doorway. "Sure."

He'd been expecting Sheppard to find him ever since the entire city had blacked out and then rebooted on back-up power. Had gone back to his office, in fact, to make himself easier to catch. And to start the benign part of a process that would ultimately be anything but.

Sheppard came in and dropped wearily down into one of the chairs across from his desk. "The fort held?"

Lorne gave him a wry grin. "The fort held," he confirmed, putting down his pencil. "Eriksson passed his crash course in crisis management with flying colors."

The Science Division had been on edge for the better part of a month -- McKay was bringing back his _sister_ , who was apparently so smart that she didn't need to have been part of the program for the last three years to be more useful than they were -- and it was the Science Division who staffed the control room. The gate room officers had been dealing with the increased stress in time-honored military fashion (the _Daedalus_ would be returning with about double the usual amount of bullets and target paper; they had had to ferry in more sand for the butts), but the last few days had been exceptionally difficult. Certainly after the McKay siblings had _ripped a hole in the fabric of reality_ and produced another Rodney. The last few hours had been closer to a madness that had nothing to do with Bizarro McKay ("call me Rod").

"No shots were fired and no scientists were sent crying from the control room?" Sheppard asked jokingly. "Good for him."

He and Sheppard had both left the lieutenants to handle things -- it maintained the young officers' authority and, besides, gate room duty couldn't _always_ be uninterrupted hours of email and tetris -- but he had been in Doctor Weir's office when the blackout had hit. Nominally they had been discussing the list of missions Military Operations had rejected and Science had insisted upon -- a regularly scheduled barter-and-compromise session that they had both learned went a lot faster without either Sheppard or McKay present -- but their hearts hadn't been in it. They'd had been reminiscing about a Colorado Springs pizza place when the lights had gone out.

They'd known since the McKay Trio (Jean Miller had turned out to be completely unlike her brother, but two Rodney McKays had been more than enough for anyone) had briefed them that there would be a power drain and that the ZPM would be substantially depleted. They had even mostly accepted the irony of expending most of their fuel resources to clean up the problems arising from trying to get more fuel. But that hadn't quite prepared them for Caughlin's cry of surprise and announcement that the ZPM was _gone_.

"The captains know," Lorne said. Radner was the only one of the three who'd been around before Atlantis had gotten their ZPM -- the three days between Everett's arrival and the _Daedalus_ 's. He'd joked about how those three days had felt a little like these three days. "I think there might be simultanous company meetings right about now."

The marines were, if anything, looking forward to things. Life in a city that did a pretty good job of taking care of itself made them uncomfortable, Lorne suspected. Or at least bored. But reduced reliance on the ZPM would require increases in patrols to compensate for the sensors that would no longer work, all of which would keep the boys very busy.

"It won't turn our lives _completely_ upside down," Sheppard said, running his fingers through his hair. "But it'll be more than the 'slight inconvenience' we were planning on before."

The initial rough sketch, all that they had thought that they'd need until they knew just how much power the ZPM had left, had been two-tiered: the short-term plan for handling daily life and then the longer-term one that would incorporate the naquadah generators the _Daedalus_ would bring them. Both plans had gone out the window with the ZPM depleted. They wouldn't get the naquadah generators for at least three months -- the minimum time for the _Daedalus_ to return to Earth, resupply, and get back -- and, since there would no longer be weekly contact with Earth to update supply lists and critical information, there could be no last-minute requests.

"On the bright side," Lorne said, "our paperwork schedule just went quarterly."

Sheppard grinned, then reached for the Rubik's cube on Lorne's desk. "Once McKay has calmed down and Zelenka's not spending all of his time keeping the Science Division from taking swan dives off of the balconies, we'll get a better picture of what we'll be up against until we can get another ZPM or at least some more naquadah generators."

Lorne knew that Sheppard knew that naquadah generators didn't grow on trees. And that there was no way that the SGC would lift their prohibition on transporting naquadria on board the _Daedalus_. But they'd be able to get a few. Which was going to be necessary -- their rate of finding (and _keeping_ ) ZPMs was not great.

"We managed before," Sheppard went on, attention focused on the toy, "and we'll manage now. We'll just have to manage with less."

Less of _what_ was becoming a question. Reduction of personnel -- both civilian and military -- had been a discussion point when they had thought that they'd still have a ZPM. But now that they had none, it was a far more serious consideration than just Lorne and Sheppard joking that they'd never get the SGC to send them the phantom Alpha Company _now_.

"We're going to be in for one hell of a fight if it comes down to sending people home," Lorne said, leaning back in his seat. It was a scientific expedition and they should expect to have priority... but what good were scientists who couldn't perform their experiments due to lack of resources? And how could you cut the protection force when the main city defenses were no longer operational? The shield was gone completely and they'd chosen not to dedicate a naquadah generator to the control chair because it was either that or shut down another part of the city -- they'd already cut back -- because they simply didn't have enough power sources.

"I know," Sheppard agreed, looking up. There was a flash of something desolate and grim and Lorne pretended that he didn't see. "We're okay with the power grid as-is?"

"It'll take a few days to sort everything out, but for now we're hanging on," he replied. "Social Sciences is _pissed_ that we had to close them down, but they were the easiest to relocate and the only active building in their part of the city."

Social Sciences had pitched a collective hissy fit because they had viewed their forced relocation to some previously unused storage areas as yet another example of how low on the totem pole their unit stood. They weren't wrong -- Social Sciences _was_ the punchline for most 'three guys walk into a bar' jokes in Atlantis -- but this time, it had been purely a numbers thing. Almost. The scientists were reasonably confident in their ability to fend off any reprisals by even the most militant of linguists, as opposed to what might happen if they had to shut down Little Tripoli.

"Doctor Weir have a meeting schedule yet?"

Lorne laughed bitterly. "Oh, _yeah_. We are pretty much on our asses in the conference room from 0830 to 1700 tomorrow. Further days to be scheduled. _And_ she said that neither of us are going off-world until at least next week."

Sheppard pursed his lips sourly and made like he was going to toss the Rubik's cube at Lorne's head before palming it. "That's what you get us for being so remarkably unsubtle about bugging out on Tuesday."

Lorne taken his team on a previously scheduled (twenty-five hours before) first-contact mission to a planet with no people. The marines had enjoyed getting out of the city and even Yoni had been remarkably eager. Maybe it was because he'd ended up with the medical exam on the _other_ Doctor McKay. "I backdated the mission file."

Sheppard rolled his eyes. "Listen carefully, my technophobic apprentice," he sighed, leaning forward as if he were imparting a great secret. "You are dealing with a boss who is not above checking file creation dates. Make up a set of dummy mission proposal files like everyone else does."

"Everyone else?" Lorne asked. Because while Lorne had long understood that Sheppard had some mastery of bullshitting his way into missions that hadn't existed but the network said that they did, he was very curious about who else was screwing around.

Sheppard leaned back and smiled. "I'm not giving up my star pupils."

Lorne made a mental note to start checking the file creation dates on the lieutenants' submissions.


	9. 3x09 drabble

  
_Once upon a time...._

"Hey."

Lorne looked up from his notes, getting a glance at the clock. It was about that time. "How'd the chat with Earth go, sir?"

Sheppard made one of those faces that answered the question before he spoke. "You'd think that they'd be less frustrating from a galaxy away," he replied as he dropped into one of the chairs in front of the desk. Lorne sort of suspected that Sheppard really came to visit the chairs.

"That good?" He didn't press because he wanted Sheppard to relive the torture, but instead because if he didn't ask questions now, then he would be surprised later on by information that had been given to his CO and not passed on. Because Sheppard tended to tune out most of what got said by General Landry and the others and if he didn't access it quickly, it would be gone.

"Well, there was one bit of news," Sheppard said, perking up a little. "They've decided that we're a little... bottom-heavy here."

"Bottom-heavy," Lorne repeated, saving the document on his laptop and closing the screen. "As in 'too many indians, not enough chiefs' kind of bottom-heavy?"

Sheppard nodded ruefully.

"Wonderful." Because one of the advantages of the set-up in Atlantis was that it was pretty much the opposite of the SGC -- they didn't have _enough_ officers. (The SGC was practically swimming in field grade guys, a fact they were not above using as a threat -- nobody was as replaceable as an O-4 assigned to Cheyenne.) The resulting ratio of manpower to duties in Atlantis kept everyone busy, officers and enlisted alike, and Lorne thought that it was rather brilliant in its chaotic simplicity. Nobody had time to get into trouble and everyone got their fair share of shit duties. It was efficient, effective, and in the spirit of a frontier outpost and _of course_ the IOA would want to screw with it.

"I'm not quite sure _what_ they want to do," Sheppard admitted, rubbing the back of his head. "I kind of stopped paying too close attention when they started with the cascade of bullshit about how we're doing such a fine job here and we should look at this as a kind of reward for all of our hard work."

Lorne sighed. "Maybe we get a proper headquarters staff?"

Sheppard frowned. "I don't want an office full of people doing nothing but pushing paper," he said. "I like this command _precisely_ because I never have to write 'he files well' on a fitrep."

They both knew that that wasn't actually even in the top five reasons for why Sheppard liked this command, but that wasn't the point.

"The odds are that they'll be Air Force," Lorne pointed out, looking for a bright side. "Even out the imbalance a little."

Sheppard laughed. "Yeah. It'll be what, two-hundred-plus to _five_?"

They moved on to the rest of the news from Earth (Ori incursions, Air Force opens its season against Tennessee, SG-1 was probably showing up either the next time the _Daedalus_ returned or with the _Odyssey_ ) and the important business of Atlantis (Charlie Company had accidentally discovered a Genii spy outpost on a training exercise; hilarity ensued) until Sheppard was summoned by Doctor Weir.

Sheppard sighed and stood up, rubbing his face. "We still on for this afternoon?"

The weekly meeting for off-world teams and officers who led off-world missions was at 1500.

Lorne chuckled. "After Murray got chased off yet another planet by pointy spears? Oh, yeah."

"What _is_ it with him?" Sheppard asked plaintively. "Can we spray him with something? I thought we were trying to send him to uninhabited worlds."

"We are," Lorne replied. "Lieutenant Murray's uncanny luck trumps the Ancient database."

There was nothing to say to that, so Sheppard didn't try, instead gesturing vaguely in farewell and heading for the door. He paused before he left, though, and turned around. "You do know that no matter how many other majors show up, I'll still love you just as much, right?"

"Thank you, sir," Lorne replied before he started laughing.

* * *

  
"You want the newbies or the rock stars?" Sheppard leaned over to ask as they watched the first batch of people transported down from the _Odyssey_ materialize. SG-1, or at least part of it, and a small contingent of soldiers and scientists, all with large bags and an assortment of crates that filled the gate room.

"I think SG-1 expects to see you and not me, sir," Lorne replied dryly. He gestured behind him to Lieutenant Salker and marines with trolleys appeared out of the north doorway.

Nevertheless, he was greeted by name by Colonel Carter and Doctor Jackson and introduced to Colonel Mitchell and Vala Mal Doran before he got down to the platform and the newest members of Atlantis's military. The scientists were guided away by Doctor Zelenka and Lorne greeted each of the five marines before sending them off with one of Salker's men, leaving him with one guy in ACUs.

"What sort of pictures do you have that they promoted _you_?" Lorne asked, holding out his hand.

The so-newly-made-he-probably-didn't-remember-to-answer-to- _Major_ Leonard grinned broadly and accepted it, shaking firmly. "I'd tell you, but then what good would they do me?"

Lorne had been amused as hell to see Leonard's name on the list of candidates to be sent to Atlantis for the newly created billets. _Captain_ Leonard had served in SG-11 for a while, longer than most because while there were constant reshufflings of the team rosters, rare was the man who didn't send Edwards storming in to Hammond's office demanding to get that _idiot_ off of his team before he got someone killed and those lucky few got to stick around.

"Come on," Lorne said, gesturing toward the south doorway, away from the marines and their trolleys, "let me show you around."

* * *

  
"I'm getting a team," Leonard announced without preamble as he dropped down on the Nautilus next to Lorne. "But you knew that already, right?"

"Yeah," Lorne confirmed as he brought his forearms together. Sheppard had asked what he'd thought and he'd enthusiastically agreed. Leonard had taken his share of the paperwork without complaint, but he was a field guy and there was no point in keeping him cooped up in Atlantis.

"Colonel Sheppard said I could pick whoever I wanted," Leonard went on, shifting so that he was in position to use the equipment rather than just sit on it. He'd been in Atlantis long enough to know that the marines descended upon exercise equipment not unlike a plague of locusts -- either you stood your ground and fought for it, or you found yourself sitting on the floor. "He also said that I shouldn't ask you for advice."

Lorne laughed instead of exhaling slowly and ended up coughing. "I happen to be very fond of my team."

He'd gone on three missions since Leonard had come to Atlantis, none of which had gone the slightest bit wrong. At least not the sort of wrong that went into AARs. Yoni was usually discreet treating those sorts of injuries and Suarez healed quickly.

"He said you'd say that," Leonard replied, leaning forward to adjust the weight, then leaning back. "I don't get it. You have a CO who's about as far from Edwards as you can get and still be in the same service and you make it up by picking the crankiest guy on the expedition for your SG team?"

"He's not that bad," Lorne promised, finishing the rep and then doing an extra two because he always lost count when he was talking to people. Yoni and Leonard hadn't gotten off to the best of starts, mostly because Leonard had shown up in the infirmary for bandaging right after Yoni had apparently had an argument with one of the other doctors. "He's good in the field. He's _great_ in the field. And his bark is worse than his bite."

"You didn't see the other doctor weeping in the corner."

* * *

  
"Holy _shit_!" Leonard shouted as he dove behind the boulder, the blast from the Wraith stunner too close behind him. Sergeants Gilman, Soto, and Anderson were already accepting the new clips Lorne was holding out to them, snapping them in and turning around to continue the fight. "That was a little close."

This was supposed to have been a cakewalk. Unfortunately, it turned out to be a cakewalk on a planet infested by Wraith.

Reletti dropped down from where he was perched and took a new clip as well. "Score another one for the Ancient database, sir," he said, then clambered back up to where he'd been relying on his coefficient of friction to win over gravity so that he could get a clean shot.

They'd been separated by more than a kilometer when they'd heard the whine of the darts. The first part of the plan was simply to get both teams back together. The next part was actually getting the hell off of this planet without meeting any scoopy beams.

"Sir," Gilman called out as he shuffled over to the edge of the boulder. "You've been hit."

Lorne looked over at Leonard's right arm, which was bloody beneath a partially torn sleeve. "Hey, Doc!"

"I'm fine," Leonard insisted, rolling on to his back so that he could sit up without putting pressure on his arm. "It'll keep."

"Bullshit," Yoni said, appearing from where he'd been effectively hidden by Ortilla's bulk. "Let me see it."

Leonard sat still as Yoni poked around. Lorne went back to putting his rifle back together, then digging up one of their last extra clips. He inserted it, but was prepared to give it up to one of the marines if they needed it since they were in firing positions and he was using his PDA to try and plot them a course to the stargate.

"I'm going to be picking debris out of this for hours," Yoni muttered and Lorne looked up. There was a hasty wrap around the arm. "Next time, Major, lead with a body part that has more protective padding."

* * *

  
"We're getting too fucking good at these."

Lorne didn't turn around. He figured Sheppard would understand. Instead, he looked out at Atlantis, beautiful as ever in the late morning light.

Sheppard was right. The wall ceremony had been very good. Practice had made perfect, or close enough to it. Boots, inverted rifles with bayonets, dogtags, and helmets all in a row, just like the pictures on the wall. They didn't have a chaplain, but they had enough devout Christians among the marines to fake it. They'd barely needed to hold any last year -- one for the opening and to remember those who'd died in the siege, then one for Maguire and the others killed on Malthusa -- and they'd already surpassed that total in the last few months. The number of men whose portraits now graced the wall of the deceased was still small in comparison to the dozens who'd died during the siege, but Lorne knew every one who'd been added since he'd arrived. Some better than others. None better then the last.

"We're only going to get better."

Sheppard joined him at the railing, not too close but close enough. "I know."

The AARs and debriefs had been nothing short of hellish and he hadn't even been there. The video had been bad, but thankfully a little abstract because god knows he's seen SG officers go delusional before, even fatally so. The interviews had been the worst, however, because those he'd had to do himself. With Heightmeyer, but with nobody else. Not even Doctor Weir.

Beckett's and McKay's had been okay, more or less -- manifestations of fears that would grow more embarrassing than disturbing as time passed. Their delusions had been more professional than personal, challenges to their egos and ethics as much as warping their realities. They'd be fine, although Lorne hoped that McKay realized that now wasn't the time to start griping at Sheppard for shooting him.

Teyla had been thoughtful and introspective and, since she was the only one not affected, her narrative had been the only straightforward one. She'd detailed her growing despair of being on the outside of a hallucination so powerful and unable to break through. She'd readily admitted her fear, saying that it was even worse than it had been with Thalan because Thalan had been someone else, but Sheppard had simply been some _where_ else all while being right there. And armed.

Ronon had approached his interview with a clinical detachment, rattling off events and what he'd seen and what he'd _thought_ he'd seen in a controlled monotone. Heightmeyer thought that he'd been the first affected, which seemed plausible considering that it was people like Ronon -- those immune to the Wraith -- that would be a prime target for manipulation. Ronon was unable to tell when he'd stopped seeing Leonard and started seeing Wraith and that clearly disturbed him, but he seemed more annoyed than troubled by it.

Sheppard, the reason the interviews had been closed to everyone including Weir, had been the most affected. If Ronon couldn't tell when the delusions had started, Sheppard knew _precisely_ when he'd fallen prey. He'd pulled out of the hallucination long enough to see the tortured Leonard blow himself to smithereens (that he'd since queried the files on Kull warriors had not gone unflagged), then right back in to reliving one of his own darker moments. ("At least it wasn't Mindanao," he'd said in a flat attempt at finding a bright side.) He was determined to convince Heightmeyer that all of his personal demons were back in their little boxes, that he was far more concerned about how he'd scared Teyla and nearly killed Ronon and McKay. Lorne believed him -- and so did Heightmeyer. They'd both dealt with him after the iratus bug fiasco ("my blue period") and Thalan and he'd been the same way then. Making crappy jokes and fretting about his team and doing pretty much anything to keep the attention off of himself.

"I'm sorry," Sheppard said. Lorne looked over. "I know you and Leonard were friends."

"Thanks," Lorne said, meaning it all the more because he knew what Sheppard had 'seen' -- the friend he hadn't been able to save, now _twice_.

Nonetheless, he felt a little... deceitful. Because he wasn't just mourning the loss of his friend (and of Salker's and Kagan's marines). He was feeling guilty over his own _relief_ that it had been Sheppard's team and not his. Intellectually, he knew that it was perfectly normal to have such feelings, that it was actually correct -- not only because Teyla was the key to stopping the whole fiasco, but also because his own team would have ripped themselves to shreds far more completely than Sheppard's had. They would have been Leonard's team -- dead by their own hands, reliving combat long gone (Hezbollah, Jaffa, _arhabi_ insurgents) except in their memories -- and nothing could have saved them.

"Kagan looked pretty good," Sheppard said, mostly to make conversation. He didn't want to be alone with himself any more than Lorne did and Lorne was grateful. "Not so pale."

Kagan wouldn't be leading his marines in anything but a formation for the next few weeks, but he'd rebounded quite nicely (according to Yoni) from his ordeal. At least physically. Thankfully, he didn't seem to remember much of anything after he'd gotten shot, so if he'd been affected by the Wraith device and suffered his own hallucinations in addition to starring in Beckett's, they were gone. That wasn't enough to get him free of Heightmeyer's clutches, but it pretty much guaranteed that he'd be spending a lot less time with her than everyone else who'd come back.

"Yeah," Lorne agreed. "We'll see how he is after a week of desk duty."

Kagan was a good kid, all the more so for being the replacement for Appleman, whom nobody missed. He'd get through this, go crazy from being trapped in the city, and then finally be set free after pestering the medical unit into clearing him for duty. If he were smart, he'd go to Clayton or Yoni instead of Carson, who had had to be bullied into letting Kagan be released in the first place. He'd go on and life would go on and Lorne wished it would hurry up and do so already.

"Come on," Sheppard said, slapping him lightly on the arm. "Let's go back inside. There's some sort of food thing at eleven and we should put in an appearance."

 

* * *


	10. 3x10

  
"I can't say that I ever thought that my first command -- hell, that any command -- would involve leading marines. But so it did and here you are and I think we did a damned fine job. I... I'm not real big on goodbyes. Or very good at them. So I'm just going to say 'thank you.' For bailing my ass out of a few -- okay, more than a few -- hairy situations and for busting your nuts to fight the good fight. You gave the best of yourselves and I am very proud and very grateful to have served with you. So thank you and Semper Fi."

There was applause and ooh-rahs and a few whistles and Sheppard was blushing a little as he sat down next to Lorne. They didn't have an auditorium that could fit the entire battalion at once, so they'd collected everyone in the big gym for the talks about what would happen Earthside, what would be the schedule until they left, and all of the other details that went into the sudden shift from using the gate bridge to plan long overdue visits home for the marines to evacuating the city for real and for good.

Lorne's head was still spinning and his voice was a little hoarse from all of the talking and shouting and order-giving he'd done in the last forty hours. But that wasn't why he shook his head no when Sheppard asked if he wanted to address the men.

The marines were sitting on the floor, on the bleachers, on the mats, and wherever else they fit. Some of them were happy to go home -- most of the battalion were either lifers or aiming to be, but some were guys just counting down the days until their enlistment was up and they could return to civilian life, which would be easier on Earth since Atlantis did not cater to double-digit midgets. And some were looking forward to returning to a more familiar battlefield and a more familiar enemy. Almost all of the marines would be returned to the Corps; the Stargate Program simply didn't need that many jarheads, stop-loss and security concerns be damned.

Lorne had already asked his trio what they wanted to do; he was sure that he could pull in enough favors with folks like Doctor Weir and General O'Neill to get them whatever they wanted. But they wanted to go back to being marines, at least for a while. Lorne understood to an extent -- the Ori were a vague threat compared to the human villains they'd known on Earth; they considered their loved ones at greater risk from terrorists than intergalactic invaders. And, truth be told, he himself wasn't sure if he even wanted to stay with the SGC; five years and maybe fighting something other than aliens would be a nice change. Although he was fairly sure that getting out would be far more difficult for him than for the marines. O'Neill had already told him that he was a lock for his own SG team, which was the sort of offer that you couldn't refuse and still hope to make O-5. And then there was the simple matter of getting into the action -- if he went back to Big Air Force, he'd just end up someone's staff officer, trapped in a headquarters office somewhere. At least with an SG team, he'd get some air. The marines had said as much when they'd had their hurried final team meeting in Atlantis, that they had rubbed off a bit on him, too, if he was looking to get to the pointy part of the spear. He'd been disproportionately pleased at the "too" part.

"All right, marines, let's get back to packing and stacking," Matt Polito announced.

* * *

  
"Your uniforms will be in your stall by the end of the day," Sergeant Meeney went on, gesturing over his shoulder in the general direction of the men's locker room. "Lieutenant Price is flying in from Osan, but Captain Yuan and Lieutenant Bleicher are at Peterson. Their phone numbers are in their files if you want to contact them before you go on leave, sir."

Lorne nodded, looking around the office that was now his. "Thank you, sergeant."

Meeney finished piling papers and files on the desk, then left him with a "Good afternoon, sir, and welcome back."

It was too soon. Even General Landry had admitted that it was too soon. Lorne had shaken hands with his marines that morning, the last time he'd probably ever see them, and now he was already the commander of a new team and he just wasn't ready. But the Ori didn't care about his feelings, so neither did the SGC. They owed him leave from before he'd even gone to Atlantis and thus he was getting a vacation before his first mission as commander of SG-18, but apart from that... back to the grindstone, swapping out the lifesucking vampires for the wacky fundamentalists with unwacky powers.

The Atlantis Battalion had been kept under the watchful gaze of the Stargate Program for a week, debriefing and discussing future options and doing all of the usual DoD steps for soldiers returning from combat. Don't beat your wife, don't drink too much, and try not to see the enemy behind every tree and in every car. Almost all of the marines were going on block leave and then to either Lejeune or Pendleton for reassignment. Of the officers, only Radner was being retained because he'd been part of the program before he'd gone to Atlantis with Everett. There'd been talk of keeping all of the marines with the Ancient gene, but he and Sheppard had gotten help from Doctor Weir in putting the kibosh on that.

"And then there were two."

Lorne turned around to see Sheppard leaning in the doorway. "Radner's running around somewhere," he replied.

Sheppard rolled his eyes and pushed off the door frame. "But he's back in the bosom of Mother Marine Corps. The recidivism rate is something like 98%; everything we did will get completely undone."

Lorne gestured for Sheppard to take a seat. He did, but frowned. "These aren't as nice as your old ones," he said, shifting around. "How long until you commandeer better ones?"

"I'll see how much I like my new team," Lorne replied, leaning against the edge of his desk. "But if you're going to be stopping by, I'll make sure to get at least one after I get back."

He hadn't figured out what he was going to do on leave yet. Get out of town, sure, maybe visit his sister, but beyond that, he had no idea. He'd spent the week either sorting out problems for the marines, getting his own supplies and gear and finding out who was on his team (he didn't get to choose), going to briefings, debriefings, and getting taken to lunches, dinners, and happy hours by old friends and acquaintances. It had been busy, which had been good, because he really wasn't ready to let go of Atlantis just yet. He didn't think Sheppard was, either.

"It's good that you got your own team," Sheppard said, slouching down. "You deserve at least that much."

"We'll see about that," Lorne replied, looking down at the service jackets of Yuan, Price, and Bleicher. "They gave me all officers. Two lieutenants and a captain. General Landry said it was the first open slot, but I'm not sure it's not a message after my last team."

Sheppard cocked his eyebrow. "If they've been paying any attention at all to our reports, they wouldn't have given you two lieutenants."

Lorne gave him a look, but he was grinning when he did because his marines had said the exact same thing that morning. "Reletti suggested that they were assigned to me to thin out the herd."

Sheppard laughed, which was good because they'd had a rough time of it with the lieutenants the last few months and it was a sign of progress that the awful joke was funny. "Your guys are good?"

He nodded, knowing that Sheppard was not referring to SG-18 and that Sheppard knew that Suarez, Reletti, and Ortilla had rejected the offer to stay at the SGC. "Reletti's over the moon -- he got put back with his old unit and he's already got a deployment date. Ortilla and Suarez are going to Lejeune, so they haven't gotten their assignments yet."

"They gave me a team, too," Sheppard said after they were quiet a moment, each lost in thoughts of what they'd left behind in Pegasus. Leaving Teyla and Ronon had been hard for Sheppard, but he wasn't about to confess to it. "Landry said I could pick them, but I don't know anyone here, so it would have just been a crap shoot anyway. I think you may have something with the message thing, though. I've got two airmen along with a scientist."

The alarm for unscheduled gate activation sounded, the flashing lights in the hallway visible through the open door. Sheppard turned to look over his shoulder. "It's going to be a long time before I stop thinking that I'm supposed to be doing something about that."

"Yeah," Lorne agreed with a sigh.

* * *

  
The phone vibrated loudly, the wood of the nightstand amplifying the noise. He reached for it by sound, not even bothering to open his eyes. "Lorne."

Next to him, Michelle stirred.

"I'm sorry to wake you, sir," the unnamed sergeant said through the earpiece. "But all SG teams are being recalled."

He sighed and sat up, rubbing his eyes and opening them. The clock said 3:42. The line from the SGC was secure and his phone was encrypted up the wazoo and he doubted that the NID or the Trust had gotten around to bugging Michelle's condo, so he asked what the problem was.

"Urgent message from the Jaffa, sir. Got a list of planets the Ori are targeting but haven't gotten to yet."

"Wonderful," he sighed. "I'll be in ASAP."

He closed the phone and pushed the blankets back.

"Do you want coffee?" Michelle asked before he could swing his legs over to the side of the bed. She'd had a year of this before he'd left, the schedule of arrivals and departures that had nothing to do with the motion of the sun or the regular schedule of a military post. He shouldn't be surprised that she'd fallen back into the old rhythm here as with everywhere else.

"No time," he replied, leaning back to kiss her forehead. "Go back to sleep."

He hadn't meant to pick up where they'd left off. He'd come back from leave and sent an email, just to check in. They'd parted amicably, if unhappily, and after fifteen months, he'd just wanted to know how she was doing. He hadn't expected her to be either available or interested, hadn't expected dinner to turn into anything more, and so he was still a little surprised that it had. Or that it was turning out to be so _easy_ to go back to being one of a pair. Of _this_ pair.

Almost a month back on Earth and he'd still rather be in Pegasus, but he was starting to wonder what he'd do if the opportunity to go back presented itself. If he had had one regret going in the first place, it had been leaving Michelle. He'd had more than a year to meditate on that choice and he wondered if he could do it again if he was asked to.

He squeezed her hand and got out of bed, into the shower and then into his clothes. He was halfway out the door before he remembered that he'd left his phone on the nightstand, so he went back upstairs and snuck into the bedroom to retrieve it.

"Be safe," Michelle murmured drowsily.

"I'll do my best," he replied.

An hour later, he was sitting next to Sheppard in the briefing room, listening to Teal'c explain the significance of the Jaffa's message to the team commanders. He felt as twitchy as Sheppard looked -- it was _hard_ to go back to being one of many, to taking far more orders than they gave. The last month had been most instructive in that way and he'd developed a new respect for the Atlantis marines, all of whom had been NCOs who'd gone from leading their own teams and squads to being back on the bottom of the totem pole, trading a leadership role for being part of something special.

Of course, getting used to a CO who was about as far from Sheppard as Earth was to Atlantis was arguably harder than simply getting used to not being an XO anymore.

The rest of SG-18 was waiting for him in their team room after Landry'd dismissed them. Yuan, Bleicher, and Price were competent and courageous and he'd go through a door with them any day, but he missed his marines because he'd have gone through hell itself with them.

It was three days before they returned to Earth from M3X-447, bloodied and filthy and heavy-hearted because the planet had fallen to the Ori in the end. Price (arm) and Bleicher (foot) were both overnighting in the infirmary and Yuan looked confused when Doctor Beckett started in on Lorne for bringing back two more dented lieutenants. Sheppard, there because one of his airmen had taken a face full of some gas, nearly choked for laughing.

With his team comfortably convalescing and the AAR not due until tomorrow (and mostly to be written by Yuan, who took his team XO duties seriously to the point that Lorne had run to Sheppard for assurance that he'd never been that eager to do paperwork), Lorne had gotten himself cleaned up and to the flower shop in time to pick Michelle up from work.

* * *

  
"Did Lam put you up to this?"

Lorne sighed. "No, Yoni. Despite the fact that you have been back two weeks and there have already been _three_ requests for reassignment from the medical research unit, no. Doctor Lam has not requested that I see if you want to go out for lunch."

Lam was Landry's daughter. If she really wanted Yoni gone, even just for a lunch break, she had far more effective ways of going about it. Beckett, on the other hand, had pleaded for him to take Yoni aside and try to explain that the folks at the SGC weren't quite used to his particular sense of humor.

Yoni was still looking at him accusingly, but he shrugged. "Sure."

Lorne was pretty sure there had to be some sort of weird Pegasus shell shock that could explain why he voluntarily threw himself into the lion's den like this. "Thirteen hundred, up on the surface. Try not to get the SFs called between now and then? We can't go out if you're in custody."

Yoni waved his hand dismissively. "They are all soft here."

Lorne sighed and left, knowing that they'd pick the conversation right back up during lunch.

"How was Israel?" he asked once they were seated at the Korean sushi bar, panchan arrayed before them.

Yoni smiled as he separated his chopsticks, a real smile and not the sardonic one Lorne was used to. "It was good. I haven't gotten to spend Yom Kippur in Yerushalayim in a very long time. I didn't know that I ever would again. I met the latest batch of nieces and nephews, saw some friends, made some connections. It was good."

The waitress came and took their orders, a transaction more complicated than it should have been because the waitress had a rough grasp of English and Yoni's accent had gotten somewhat thicker for his time away.

"I heard from the marines," Yoni said after Lorne had given an edited-for-public-space recap of the week's misadventures against the Ori. "They send regards to you. Reletti is far more verbose in emails than expected."

"How are they?" Lorne asked, not bothering to hide his hurt at them contacting Yoni and not him. He understood -- back on Earth, he was an Air Force officer and they were marine NCOs and the twain did not meet -- but he still felt it. Maybe as much because of the fact that it was yet another way things were different.

"Reletti should be in Kuwait by now, getting ready to move north," Yoni answered, picking up a piece of kimchee with his chopsticks. "Suarez just got into sniper school, but Reletti don't know when he goes to that. Ortilla is still in North Carolina; he had his assignment changed on him out of the blue."

Ortilla didn't have enough time in to start thinking about promotion to gunnery sergeant, but he'd be an excellent leadership asset to anyone's unit. "I might have had something to do with that," Lorne said, going for a slice of lotus root. "I submitted paperwork for their latest fitreps a couple of weeks ago."

Yoni, mouth full, just nodded.

During the meal, they spoke mostly about people from Atlantis. Lorne may not have heard from his marines, but he had heard from a few of the lieutenants and Captains Hanzis and Polito. Unlike the marines, most of the science and medical divisions were being retained by the SGC, although there had been some attrition in both departments. Yoni reported that Clayton was still out adventuring, last postcard from Bora Bora and the last email from Tahiti.

"I'm thinking of leaving," Yoni said after the waitress brought their sushi.

Lorne wasn't surprised. Despite popular belief, Yoni didn't usually set out to make everyone around him miserable. For all of his many personality quirks and failings, Yoni was usually on his own version of best behavior unless provoked or deeply unhappy. "It's only been two weeks," he pointed out. Because as miserable as Yoni might be, it was still early .

"It's been six years," Yoni replied sourly as he reached for the soy sauce. "Everything under the mountain that made me happy to get stuck in Antarctica is still there. Budget cuts are making escape to another remote facility unlikely and I'm not sure I'd be happy there anyway. None of this is what I got into epidemiology to study and...."

"And you spent a year running around in the field and being trapped in a lab sucks," Lorne finished for him. He debated telling Yoni that Sheppard said that McKay was having the same adjustment difficulties, but chose not to because it was very rare for Yoni to be open like this and that would just be an excuse for him to close up again.

"Yes," Yoni agreed brightly, seemingly pleased to be understood. "I'm still young enough to have some good running around years left and if I want to leave the Mountain, then the sooner I go, the better. I can use 'classified research' for only so much explanation of my erratic publishing schedule since 2000."

Lorne didn't pretend to understand academia and he knew Yoni didn't especially care for all of the gamesmanship, either. "Have you decided or are you just mulling it over?"

 _Do you want me to talk you out of it_ , he didn't say.

"I'm going to explore my options," Yoni said, taking a sip of his barley tea. "In the grand scheme of things, this isn't the worst place in the world to work, but, well, you understand."

But it wasn't the galaxy either of them wanted to be employed in.

* * *

  
"This way, Major," Sergeant Harriman said quickly, ushering him into Landry's office. He'd barely gotten through the stargate, the wormhole still open behind him, when there'd been two airmen at the bottom of the ramp telling him that the general wanted to see him. _Now_.

"Reporting as ordered, sir," he said when Landry turned around, a thunderous expression on his face.

Landry didn't ask him to sit. He didn't return the salute. He just glowered at him. "What do you know about this, Lorne?" he asked ominously.

Lorne dropped his salute. "I don't know what you're talking about, sir."

He knew roughly what this was about -- there'd been exactly one subject of gossip in the gate room. But if he couldn't play completely dumb, then he could play dumb enough.

"Did Sheppard talk to you? Did he tell you what he was planning?"

Part of him was distinctly amused by this. By having to lie for Sheppard one more time. The rest of him was worried that it would be the last time because Sheppard hadn't exactly taken the best assault team with him through the gate.

"We discussed the fate of Atlantis, sir, if that's what you're asking," he replied. "We both agreed that we wished that we could go back to fight the Replicators."

Landry slapped a file folder on to his desk in frustration. "Well he _has_. And he's taken three civilians with him."

"Doctor McKay's not as useless as he used to be, sir," Lorne offered.

Landry stared at him. "You're not that stupid, Major. Please don't pretend to be."

"Sorry, sir."

Landry sighed and sat down heavily, motioning for Lorne to do so as well. He did, cautiously. "Are you telling me that you had no idea that Sheppard was planning to hijack the puddle jumper and make for Atlantis?"

"If I had, I'd have gone with him, sir," Lorne replied. Which was the truth and a lie all wrapped up together. He'd known that Sheppard had been considering such a move; hell, he'd helped work out some of the logistics of taking back the jumper. But Sheppard had made it very clear that he wanted Lorne to stay behind and stay clear. Because if either the plan failed or if the plan succeeded and Sheppard wasn't there to take command again ("the odds are that I'll either be dead or punted out of the Air Force before I can catch my breath"), then Sheppard wanted Lorne to be in a position to go back to Atlantis when the time came. Even if that meant leading a team to do cleanup after the radiation levels had cooled down from the nuke.

Landry looked at him closely. Lorne looked back, clearing his mind of all thoughts pertaining to the fallout of getting caught lying to a general about collaborating with an officer gone rogue.

"Go take care of your team, Major," Landry said. "I'll expect your AAR by the end of the day."


	11. 3x11

  
He was in the commissary watching Yoni dissect both his lasagna and Doctor Lam's theory on vectors of transmission (at least that's what he thought that they were arguing about) when an airman came up to the table with the 'bearer of bad news' look about him.

It had to be about Atlantis. The entire Mountain knew about Sheppard's stunt by now; Lorne had been getting sidelong glances since he'd shown up for work this morning (early, since he hadn't been sleeping anyway) and former Atlantis personnel had been finding reasons to run into him. Out of the people he actually didn't mind seeing, which was very few considering who was currently in Atlantis, Radner (who had carefully not asked any direct questions) had been in and out of his office all morning and Yoni (who seemed content to assume that Lorne had been an accomplice) had come to _him_ for lunch instead of Lorne being called by someone from Medical and and being asked to stage an intervention.

"Major Lorne," the airman began, drawing himself up. "General Landry would like to see you, sir."

Yoni and Lam stopped arguing. Pretty much everyone else in the commissary stopped talking, too.

Lorne exchanged a look with Yoni, then stood and picked up his tray.

Five minutes later, he was escorted into Landry's office. Landry was on the phone -- the _red_ phone -- and Lorne stood quietly waiting for acknowledgment.

"He's crazy, you know that?" Landry said as he hung up the phone and Lorne felt almost giddy with relief because he was pretty sure Landry wasn't talking about the President.

"Yes, sir," he answered, because Landry wasn't wrong. "But in a good way."

A grunt that was probably agreement. "Stop smiling, Major," Landry warned with a wag of his finger. "I'm still trying to figure out your part in this."

Lorne bit his lip, but he couldn't quite school himself to perfect seriousness. He'd been wound up like a spring ever since he'd found out that Sheppard had left, convinced that he'd seen the last of John Sheppard and the others and wishing that he could have gone along nonetheless. He'd understood why he couldn't have gone alone, was honored that Sheppard was essentially trusting Atlantis to him, but that hadn't changed how he'd reacted once he'd found out. And that the plan had _worked_ , as batshit insane and impossible as it was... he felt like doing a fist-pump or a victory dance.

"I take it everyone's okay, sir?" he ventured instead.

"Yes, they're okay," Landry agreed, sounding annoyed at the news even though he obviously wasn't. "Including General O'Neill and Mister Woolsey."

"That's good, sir," Lorne said, part prompt and part honest reaction. "Does this mean we're returning to Atlantis?"

The scientists were mostly still around, or at least in the employ of the Air Force -- Yoni had explained that everyone with a doctorate was busy preparing journal articles and conference papers, all of which had to be checked for classified material before they could be submitted to outside reviewers. Recalling all of the marines would be a bitch and a half, although not nearly as bad as it would have been a month from now. Most of them were either still on or just off of block leave -- everyone had been owed at least a month's time and most had opted to take all of it before going to their new posts. They'd piss off the Pentagon big time by yanking marines out of billets they'd only been in for a couple of weeks, but that was much easier than going through the selection process to get new ones and so Lorne had little doubt that that was what would happen.

"The expedition will be re-established," Landry admitted grudgingly. "Who goes back has yet to be determined."

Lorne didn't say anything to that -- if Sheppard's team had managed to defeat the Replicators, save Atlantis, _and_ save the bacons of the head of Homeworld Security and the IOA's most powerful member, then of course they'd be rewarded with a long twist in the wind. It was how things worked.

There were a few more things said after that, but nothing else could match the importance of the news that had already been imparted and Landry quickly let him go with the exhortation to go get the rumor mill started. Lorne was completely unsurprised to find both Radner and Yoni waiting in his office, although the addition of SG-1 probably could have been anticipated as well if he'd been putting any energy into foresight and not into concentrating on one-foot-in-front-of-the-other.

"Everyone's safe," he announced as he went to his desk, sitting down heavily as his legs gave in and became jelly. The shock was starting to set in, he suspected. Knowing that Sheppard had set off on suicide missions before and returned from them was entirely different from actually planning one and having such a fine appreciation for just how slight the chances of success were. "The city's good, everyone's in one piece, and they'll know more after the _Daedalus_ finishes its survey."

There wasn't so much applause as a collective sigh of relief and congratulation.

"I suppose this means I'll have to return everything," Vala sighed and nobody dared ask for details.

To the victors go the spoils only in the movies, so Sheppard and Weir were both ordered home straightaway so that their fates could be decided. Everyone else followed, leaving Atlantis in the temporary custody of Teyla, Ronon, and the crew of the _Daedalus_. It took four days -- and a lot of yelling by General O'Neill -- before they were told that there would be no disciplinary action taken against either Sheppard or Weir. On the fifth day, everyone got down to work.

* * *

  
"What's the tally?"

Radner typed a few keystrokes and squinted at his laptop screen. Lorne suspected that Radner would finally have to give up and get glasses before they packed up to return to Atlantis. "Provided the SGC doesn't change their mind and fire Colonel Sheppard, we've got all of the officers accounted for. I spoke to Hanzis and Polito this morning; they're both still waiting for travel orders. Although Matt would probably pay his own way if he had to."

"I think he'd _walk_ from Lejeune if he had to," Lorne agreed. Upon his return to Earth, Polito had been named staff secretary to a marine general and his reaction to the phone call asking him if he wanted to go back to Atlantis had been "Sir, I'd hug you if I could."

Radner grinned. "As for the lieutenants, sir, we've got about half of them already processing back into the program. Osgeny, Eriksson, Kagan, Patchok, and Murray are confirmed. Gillick and Salker are waiting to see what the decision is going to be regarding promotions. Paik hasn't refused the assignment yet, but he's got a chance to get back into a Harrier and I don't think we'll see him again unless he screws that pooch."

Both Gillick and Salker had sufficient time in grade that they had to seriously consider their career trajectories before making any decisions. Special Ops was usually more satisfying than a career in the regular service, but it wasn't always great when it came time for awards and promotions. Lorne suspected that Gillick would rather be a lieutenant in Atlantis than a captain on Earth, but he wouldn't be surprised if Salker chose to stay behind for a chance at a better spot once he got promoted.

"So we're down between one and four lieutenants," Lorne said, unashamedly counting on his fingers. They hadn't ever gotten a chance to replace Cadman before they'd bugged out for Earth, letting her gunnery sergeant run the platoon in her place. "I'm sure the SGC has a whole pile of replacements to suggest. Are they going to see if Cadman wants to come back?"

Lorne didn't think Cadman wanted to come back -- at least not in a military capacity -- and he wasn't sure that they even wanted her back. It wasn't a gender thing per se -- she had designed and trained their EOD team and all of the marines who'd taken the combat engineering course with her were better for it, but in a city where a quarter of the scientists were engineers of some stripe, they needed infantry officers more than they needed explosives experts.

"No, sir," Radner replied. "Lieutenant Cadman is off getting her Ph.D."

"Good for her," Lorne said, since there wasn't much else to say. "How are we with the rank and file?"

"Pretty much the same boat as with the officers, sir," Radner answered, not looking up. "We're keeping all of our senior NCOs and the retention rate's hovering around 80% for the E-5s and E-6s. We've got a handful of sergeants who are enrolled in schools and will be allowed to finish before being asked to decide on returning to Atlantis, so I'm not counting them. We've also got more than a dozen E-5s who have requested and received command recommendations so they can submit their jackets for promotion. We don't know yet if we get them until the board convenes or if they stay behind."

Lorne wasn't sure if any of his trio was coming back. Suarez was one of the marines off at a school; he had another three weeks of sniper training out in Hawaii and Lorne wouldn't be at all surprised if Suarez chose to stay on Earth -- he was the least acclimated of the three, always a little uncomfortable with the constant, low-level weirdness of not being on Earth. Reletti, currently somewhere near Ramadi, had received a letter for promotion and a waiver to apply for the program to go to college and get commissioned. And Ortilla was living in the same city as his kid for maybe the first time ever (Ortilla didn't tell and Lorne didn't ask). Yoni was already griping about having to break in new marines for their off-world team.

"We getting an Alpha Company?" Lorne asked hopefully.

"I believe that's still scheduled for when hell freezes over, sir," Radner replied with a perfectly straight face.

"So no delays, then."

* * *

  
On the home front, things ended without either a bang or a whimper. When he'd first gotten back -- to Earth, to the Mountain, to Michelle -- Lorne had wondered if he'd return to Atlantis if given the chance. He wasn't on the cusp of promotion, but he was closing in on it and presumably he'd end his stint as XO at the same time he ended his stint as a major. The SGC had plans for him -- Landry had said as much and the fact that they'd given him his own team when he was still an O-4 had said it louder -- and with job security came options.

Actually getting down to the business of building a life beyond the service wasn't a bad idea. Certainly not when things with Michelle picked up almost right where they'd left off. He had a job he could grow to love, a girl he already loved, and what else was he supposed to be waiting for? He had never especially considered himself one of those hardcore careerists, the guys who counted alimony merely as the dues required to continue in their profession. He'd enjoyed his time in SG-11 and with the Stargate Program in general, but if push had ever really come to shove, he'd always suspected that he'd choose people over planes if there wasn't a way to get both.

And then had come Atlantis, where all of the rules and all of the expectations no longer applied. It was, bar none, the must satisfying job he'd ever had in uniform and he hadn't realized how much he was willing to trade to keep that. How much he was willing to sacrifice.

But when Sheppard had come to him and they'd started speaking -- in necessarily vague terms -- about what would be required to get a jumper back to Atlantis, he'd known. When his mind had immediately started calculating how they could get resources and personnel back to the city with the least amount of loss and fuss, when he had only later realized that he hadn't even stopped to consider Michelle, he'd felt ashamed, but not surprised.

He almost wished Michelle had been angrier, that they had actually fought about it. She _was_ angry, but not necessarily at him and he didn't want that kind of forgiveness. He'd used her -- as back-up plan, as rebound -- and was prepared to leave her now that he could get back what he really wanted. At least that's how he saw it. She saw it differently, told him that he'd never really come back to her and it was her own fault for wishing so hard that she had started believing it.

He spent the last two weeks before they boarded the _Daedalus_ for the trip back to Atlantis -- back _home_ \-- living in base housing at Peterson.

* * *

  
"There's a certain element of deja vu all over again about this," Sheppard said with a hint of a smile as he dropped down into the chair across from Lorne. Across the room, a still-scowling Caldwell, having finished with Sheppard, took out his frustrations on the coffee urn.

Lorne couldn't help but grin back. Sheppard was right, of course, They'd spent the last trip to Atlantis -- Lorne's _first_ trip to Atlantis -- getting the marines in and out of trouble with the _Daedalus_ captain and crew, too. "Are the marines confined to quarters yet?"

The same problems that had plagued the first voyage were present this time and experience hadn't earned them much forgiveness or any leeway. Caldwell wanted the marines out of the way and out of trouble and Sheppard and Lorne were trying to accomplish the latter by encouraging the former. There was no topside to run around on, the PT facilities were designed to accommodate the ship's crew and not a couple hundred additional personnel (let alone, judging by the breakage reports, any marines), and there was still another ten days to go.

"Not yet," Sheppard replied cheerfully. "The officers, on the other hand, are maybe a little closer. I think we're going to have to ditch the rest of the javelin toss."

Caldwell had forbidden another scavenger hunt before they'd even cleared the Kuiper belt, so Lorne, Sheppard, and the captains had ended up designing the Post-Modern Pentathalon to keep the marines occupied and trained.

"They're worried we're going to scratch the paint job on one of the 302s?" Lorne scoffed. They were using one of the fighter bays for most of the events as well as everyday training. The crew chief was very close to dropping the force field and spacing them all, but it was the only large, empty space on board. "I guess we can go with the weightlifting."

"And maybe move the marathon up a day or two," Sheppard agreed, adding with false solemnity, "I don't think the stunner tag is going to go over well at all."

That they were using modified Wraith stunners -- enough to hurt like a bitch, not enough to actually paralyze -- was not going to matter when they had to face the music on that one. The marines would enjoy getting shot -- hell, they were already having too much fun testing the pistols out on each other -- but a crew member would invariably become an innocent victim and that's when all hell would break loose. It was why they had initially scheduled it near the end of the voyage.

"Probably not," Lorne agreed, then pushed back his chair to stand up as Doctor Weir approached their table. She waved him back down before he could stand.

"Why do I think that the two of you are up to no good?" she asked, a wry smile on her face as she took one of the empty seats at the small table. "Could it be the matching innocent expressions? Or the fact that Colonel Caldwell has already asked to speak to me regarding the comportment of our passengers on his ship?"

"Do you ever notice that they're only _ours_ when they're misbehaving?" Sheppard asked instead of replying.

Weir gave him a cock-eyed look that was more irony than warning. "Just don't do anything that's going to make it difficult for us to ever get another marine transported aboard this vessel."

"We're just exercising them," Sheppard promised.

Lorne kept his eyes on his cruller and his smile mostly to himself.


	12. 3x12

"Put a halt on the unpacking," Lorne said as he walked into the conference room. The three captains and Lieutenant Gillick, currently serving as logistics officer, stood up and gave him matching looks of cautious curiosity that had nothing to do with the fact that Sheppard wasn't right behind him. They were used to that by now.

"Sir?" Polito finally asked as Lorne took his seat, the others following.

"We may be bugging out again," he explained grimly, opening the folder that had his notepad and the printout of the picture McKay had been showing them at the command briefing. "The whale problem is actually the least of our worries."

Explaining the eruptions on the sun and what it could and would do to the planet didn't take long and then they were on to figuring out how to evacuate the city. Little Tripoli had been up and running within days of their arrival -- military efficiency plus the very real need to keep anyone in uniform far ( _far_ ) away from anyone connected to the _Daedalus_ (the stunner tag had gone off as expected -- a rousing success among the marines and an even more rousing reaction from Caldwell and his officers). But it had been two months since they'd arrived back in Atlantis and even the civilians were settled in again. Uprooting everyone and everything would be difficult; the preparations for the evacuation before the Wraith siege had taken weeks and that had been a much smaller group.

"How much can the _Daedalus_ take?" Radner asked. "Conversely, we might be able to use their transporter to ricochet the harder-to-move equipment to a safe location, temporarily or permanently."

Whether they were redeploying to Earth or relocating to the Alpha site and then hoping to re-establish a base in Pegasus was still undetermined; it would depend on how bad the damage to the planet was and how much they could salvage from Atlantis. Lorne knew that there were Ancient outposts that could be turned into decent homes -- his team had found some of them -- but they came without much of the protections that Atlantis afforded and the civilian and military roles would have to be seriously re-thought if that were to happen.

"Right now, the _Daedalus_ is taking our most serious medical cases," Lorne replied. "If we have to evacuate the city, they'll take what we can't get through the gate or into a jumper. We'd have to run the idea of bouncing stuff to a third location by Hermiod or whoever is going to be working out the details of that. I don't speak transporter well enough to say. But it sounds like a good idea."

Radner grimaced, acknowledging their limitations.

"How are our marines, sir?" Hanzis asked.

"Three have been transported up to the _Daedalus_ ," Lorne replied. They were all from Bravo Company Second Platoon, since Eriksson's unit had been pulling security in the sub-levels and thus been closest to the whales. "Which leads me to the next point. We don't need any heroes here -- we'll have plenty of hands to do whatever needs to be done, so don't let your marines brush off symptoms just because they've had worse in the past. Order them to the infirmary if you have to. And that goes for present company as well."

Lorne looked straight at Hanzis, who was currently winning the fight against a bloody nose but looked like he was losing the one to a headache. Hanzis looked back steadily, but nodded.

"Right," Lorne sighed. "So let's get moving."

* * *

  
"Caldwell's going along with it?" Lorne asked, a little incredulous. Not that he thought that Caldwell wouldn't do anything, including putting his ship at risk, to save Atlantis, but, well, this was the kind of suicide mission that invariably got cited as a reason why Sheppard shouldn't have the command and Caldwell should get it instead.

Sheppard shrugged. "It looks like a good idea in the absence of better ones," he replied a little quietly. Over the course of their flying careers, they'd both had to adjust to speaking and listening without hearing too well -- ear trouble and learning to communicate over droning engines taught everyone early. As a result, while Sheppard tended to shout among the civilians, he trusted Lorne to be able to read his lips and figure out what he was saying. "But I think it could work."

Lorne thought it might, too, but not to the point that he wasn't going to support the decision to evacuate all non-essential personnel from the ship before it left orbit. "Good luck, sir," he said instead.

"Thanks," Sheppard replied, then turned to Reletti, who was standing a little apart to give them the pretense of privacy. "The chair is a little overwhelming at first, Sergeant. But just force it to behave and it'll knuckle under. Kind of like the city when you first got here."

"Yes, sir." Reletti had been the consensus choice among the senior officers to be Walking ATA Gene with Sheppard out of the city. Courtesy of his time with Lorne's team, Reletti was the natural gene carrier with the most experience interacting with large-scale technology. (Or at least successful experience; Beckett, even if he hadn't been kept away by the overflowing infirmary, was a reluctant alternative.) If the shit hit the fan, Lorne was to plop Reletti into the control chair and do what he could to save Atlantis -- up to and including seeing if the city could actually still fly. "Although you'll forgive me if I'm not eager to find out."

"I'm hoping to save that lesson for another day, too," Sheppard said. This was not the time to tell Reletti that Lorne and Sheppard had already discussed familiarizing Reletti and the most adept of the other gene carriers with the control chair. There were a few civilian scientists who could probably be taught to work the chair, Sheppard thought, and it was becoming more and more impractical to have such a crucial tool be limited to just one effective user.

Sheppard looked like he was going to say something else, but their radios beeped and while Lorne wasn't sure if Sheppard could hear the words that followed, Sheppard could definitely tell that there was _something_ being said.

"The marines on board the _Daedalus_ have been beamed down to Little Tripoli," Lorne translated. Sheppard nodded and gestured for them to go meet them.

"Suarez is gonna be so pissed," Reletti said cheerfully as they walked to the transporter. "He finally gets back to Atlantis and we're under siege by fucking _whales_."

Lorne grinned a little; Suarez, never a fan of anything weird, was going to be wondering (aloud) why he had agreed to return to space duty. Especially since Atlantis had little use for trained snipers.

The humor didn't last long, though. Before they could reach where the marines had been beamed down, Lorne's radio chirped again and Yoni told him that Sergeant Bell had died and that Ortilla had been brought in after collapsing in a hallway.

* * *

  
"Give me an update, Doc," Lorne called over his shoulder. He was sitting at the gate officer's station (Lieutenant Murray, exiled to the balcony, looked on) with Radner at his side. "In layman's terms," he added, since under pressure Zelenka was usually no better than McKay with the technobabble.

Polito and Hanzis were out in the city; Hanzis had a detachment and was covering the medical suites and general environment while Polito and the larger force were covering the city at large and especially building where they'd herded all of the civilians. With the shield, Atlantis should be safe whether or not the _Daedalus_ was able to stop the sun flare from nuking the planet, but Lorne hadn't wanted to take any chances. The database seemed to say that the tall blue building in E-5 had once been a music conservatory, but whatever it had been, it seemed to have more shielding than the typical Atlantis structure (all of Atlantis was soundproof, but some areas were apparently more soundproof than others) and could serve as a short-term bunker against the aural assault from the whales circling below.

"The prominence is collapsing," Zelenka reported from across the room. Ronon was sitting with him, booted out of the infirmary by both Carson and Yoni because they were running out of space and he was underfoot. "We'll know within minutes if the _Daedalus_ will be able to deflect the radiation."

If Sheppard's plan didn't work -- basically, if the _Daedalus_ exploded -- then they'd have to choose what to do next off of a short list of possibilities. Or, rather, Lorne would have to choose since he was effectively in charge at the moment. (Weir would recover once the whales were gone, Yoni had assured Lorne when he'd made one last visit to the infirmary.) Atlantis had a fully-functional life support system, so immediate evacuation was not necessary. But nobody in either Science or Medical had been able to give any kind of assurance that staying on a nuked planet, even in their little hermetically sealed bubble, was a good idea for any prolonged period. Plus the whales would have little incentive to leave the safety of the shield, exacerbating the problem.

(Sergeant Bell was the only fatality so far, but most of the people who'd been sent up to the _Daedalus_ to escape the sonic torture and then sent back down to avoid being blown up were not doing well. Zelenka had some of his engineers trying to come up with some sort of counter-whale business, something that would generate sound waves that would cancel out the ones the whales were emitting. But they were having no luck so far and more than one had fallen prey to the threat they were trying to defeat.)

To his left, Radner was speaking quietly on his radio. Lorne had his radio on, too, but he had switched from the battalion command net to the city command net in recognition of his change in duties. Lorne waited, since whatever it was was obviously not trivial.

"Major Lorne?" one of the civilian engineers on duty in the control room called over. "We've had a building collapse in E-4. It wasn't anywhere we were working and there's nobody nearby."

Lorne leaned back in his seat to look at the screen that depicted life signs. He didn't doubt that the engineer could read it herself, but he wanted to see what she considered "nearby."

"Marines watched it go down,' Radner added. "Said it imploded."

"Did the whales do that?" Lorne asked the engineer.

"It's possible," she admitted. "We haven't done a systematic study of the resonance frequencies of building materials in Atlantis, but it could absolutely be in the same range as what's making our ears bleed."

"Fantastic," Lorne sighed. "So there's no way to tell if the central spire or the building in E-5 will go down?"

The engineer shook her head no. Lorne turned to Radner. "Warn everyone to start looking for cracks and make sure everyone has an escape route to the nearest transporter. Here and there."

Radner repeated the order for Polito and Hanzis and then called Murray over to organize the evacuation of the control and gate rooms. They had regular 'fire drills' -- it was Lorne's job to make sure that most of them were not suspiciously timed to when Weir had refused to authorize one of Sheppard's walkabouts -- and so he wasn't worried about people not knowing what to do. He _was_ worried about losing the nexus of Atlantis, however. The fire drill included grabbing the control crystals that would allow them to dial Earth from anywhere, but still....

"How’re they doing?" Ronon asked Zelenka.

"Well," Zelenka sighed, "according to my calculations, the blast wave should have hit us by now but I’m reading no discernible increase in radiation."

Which only meant that Sheppard's plan wasn't an immediate failure, but he appreciated it when Zelenka allowed for Ronon's more hopeful scenario.

* * *

  
"To get back to this motherfucking galaxy, I spend three weeks allowed only to go the head, the gym, the chow hall, and my rack. That's it. And all under fucking guard -- it was like being back in basic except it was fucking _airmen_ instead of DIs. Fucking Air Force _hall monitors_! I hope whatever you fuckers did on the last trip was worth it because you fucking _owe_ us for that. And then we get here and we're under assault by fucking talking _whales_. A month ago, I was in fucking _Hawaii_. I should have... Good afternoon, sir."

Lorne looked up, too amused by Suarez's aborted harangue to be offended by the insults to the Air Force. (Especially since it was only a matter of time before Suarez learned who was really responsible for the _Daedalus_ 's crew's reactions.) He had been hidden by the curtain partially separating Ortilla's bed from the space next to it. Ortilla, not quite improved enough to be discharged (blood pressure still too low and Yoni thought he was hiding a severe headache), was definitely improved enough for visitors and to gripe about infirmary food. Reletti had duly informed him that six weeks of his mama's cooking had made him soft. "Welcome back, Sergeant."

"Thank you, sir," Suarez replied, still a little stiff. "It's good to be back. Talking whales or not."

Lorne nodded and smiled, letting Suarez off the hook. "I have to get back to work," he said, standing up. Reletti pushed up from his stool, too. "Team meeting Friday at 1730."

They'd gone out as a quartet twice, but there'd been too much to do around Atlantis to do much galactic galavanting.

Ortilla grinned. "Aye aye, sir," he said. "And thanks for the contraband."

Lorne had brought him some snacks from the commissary. "Don't rat me out to Doctor Safir," he warned. Never mind that Lorne had asked Yoni what to give Ortilla. The boys liked to think that they could pull stuff over on authority.

He stopped by the doctor's station on the way out to get updates on the other marines still in care. Keller, one of the new doctors, told him that she thought they'd have an empty infirmary by Wednesday, "but then everyone who thinks they're suffering from after-effects will start trickling in. I'm kind of torn between appreciating their consideration for waiting until the actual crisis is over and wanting to hit them all with wet noodles for being so smart and yet still able to con themselves into thinking they've got illnesses they can't possibly get."

"Haven't had much time with Doctor McKay yet, have you?" Lorne asked by way of reply.

Sheppard was in Hanzis's office when Lorne passed by, but he showed up at Lorne's doorstep a few minutes later.

"Wall ceremony for Bell is on Thursday," Sheppard said, coming in and dropping down into his chair. The Ancients had pretty much left Little Tripoli as it stood and Sheppard had been open in his relief that Lorne's furniture had been undisturbed. "And Engineering is going to be needing escorts to do structural assessments _again_."

They'd spent a month checking over the city after they'd returned, so they at least had baselines by which to compare. Hopefully, the second go-round would take less time. "Can we halve the detail?"

The marines had been going apeshit by the end of it, reduced to pack animals and unskilled labor while the scientists trekked along like Victorian adventurers with their retinues.

Sheppard chuckled. "We can quarter it," he replied. "Until there's an actual problem, I'm happy to drop it down to three marines per team. How's Ortilla?"

"Getting there," Lorne replied, relieved. "Suarez finally caught up with him and Reletti in the infirmary."

It had been almost a day since disaster had been averted, although the _Daedalus_ was going to need some repairs before heading back to Earth. It would probably be another few days before anything like normal operations returned.

"Reletti won the stunner tag, didn't he?" Sheppard asked, although they both remembered it perfectly well. Reletti wasn't excessively humble about his skills, but he'd admitted that he'd probably had an advantage for having spent his 'vacation' in a recon unit in Iraq and not at home chilling out on leave.

Suarez would be all the more pissy once he found that out -- on top of both that he'd missed out on the stunner tag and that that was the reason why he'd had such a miserable ride over. Between that, Reletti still a being little cranky from being treated like an inanimate object by the scientists who needed his gene, Ortilla hating being fussed over, and Yoni was always in a foul mood when under siege by hypochondriacs... "I'm thinking of taking a trip to M5L-3G5."

Sheppard cocked his head. "Isn't that the monk planet?"

Enforced silence except by the party designated to conduct business. Which, in this case, would mean Lorne. They usually just sent a lieutenant, since a platoon of marines could maintain silence more easily than McKay, which was why Sheppard never went after a first disastrous meeting.

"Yep."


	13. 3x13: Nolo Contendere

  
"I think I would have preferred a couple of Our Fathers and no meat for a week," Suarez sighed as he started dialing Atlantis. Next to him, Ortilla and Reletti kept watch and tried to obscure the symbols because they'd already had more than enough trouble coming from people finding out that Atlantis still stood. "How many more of these do we have to do, sir?"

'These' were the apologies Atlantis had to make for failing to meet their obligations during the almost three months away from Pegasus.

"A couple more stops on the road to Canossa," Lorne replied with a sigh, standing still while Yoni picked some ladybug-like creature off of his shoulder near his neck. "We pissed off a lot of people."

In most cases, it was sufficient to explain that there had been a terrible illness on their world and they could not travel until they were sure that they would not bring the disease with them. (It helped that Ortilla still looked a little off, although he assured everyone that he was fine and Yoni had cleared him for duty the previous week.) In some cases, however, excuses and apologies weren't enough.

They had traded marine manpower for a share of crops on Plareus and then not delivered; the Plarians were pretty sure that they never wanted to deal with Atlantis again and, not unreasonably, demanded some sort of compensation for the goods they had already traded. Lorne had come with a list of alternative payments and had chosen to err on the side of overcompensation, since while the Plarians had been wronged, they were also pretty greedy. He'd bet (successfully, it would seem) that they would accept Atlantis's apologies and a little sweetener rather than cast aside a wealthy trading partner. It soured them all on the penance process, Lorne knew -- it was hard to be genuinely contrite when you knew that the offended party was looking more at the gold in your purse than their own injuries.

Plareus, at least, was just a financial transaction and could be brushed off as such. There had been two worlds where they'd failed to cowboy up in more important situations -- the Wraith had culled Marsoma and nobody had come to the survivors' rescue and then they'd been AWOL when Zavos needed help shoring up their cops' defenses against the spring floods. In both cases, there was no way a simple "I'm sorry" and a feeble excuse could cut it.

"We're going to be going out on a lot of 'please-trade-with-us' missions again, aren't we, sir?" Reletti asked as he entered the code on his GDO.

"Depends on how well we grovel," Lorne replied. So far, they were doing okay in that regard -- their affluence allowed them to be generous in their reparations -- but Sheppard had taken his team out this morning in hopes of establishing a new trade partnership just in case. It was also to check on some wacky rumor, but it was really about the trade possibilities.

They got confirmation that the shield was down, stepped back into Atlantis, and that was the last time Lorne thought about either Sheppard or trade missions until hours later when Lieutenant Nagley radioed him to announce that Colonel Sheppard was two hours overdue.

"He has another hour," Lorne told Nagley, who was new to Atlantis and not quite used to 'Sheppard Time.' Every team, scientific expedition or marines on exercise, had three hours' grace period when it came to mission duration. But Sheppard's team was the only one that consistently took advantage of it, much to everyone's unease. "If they're not back in half an hour, dial the planet and try to establish radio contact. If you can't make any, put the ready-room team on notice."

By the time Nagley had to ask formal permission to send out the SAR team, Lorne was already en route to the control room. Doctor Weir appeared shortly after he arrived, presumably after hearing his voice.

"We've sent teams to this planet before," she said, concern and surprise on her face. "The marines have never reported anything interesting, let alone dangerous."

Lorne nodded; he'd seen the reports, too, and had no idea of what to make of the situation. The business with the superhero was just plain weird -- back at the SGC, there could have been a whole host of possibilities from an Ashrak to one of Nirrti's lab rats to something else new and strange. Here in Pegasus, however, things tended to come in more predictable flavors and superheroes tended not to be one of them.

"It could be anything," he said, "But it doesn't have to be anything bad. This won't be the first time we've had to activate the search and rescue team because of a busted radio or someone forgetting to look at a watch. Plus Doctor Beckett is pretty notorious for not letting anyone rush him through a patient load if that's what he's doing there."

That Sheppard's team was the focus of the 'false alarm' SAR activations the overwhelming majority of the time was left unspoken, but he could tell that Weir remembered and was clinging to those memories.

Kagan's platoon entered the gate room with quiet bustle. Kagan had been around long enough to have been on a few of these already -- and been the quarry for a few himself -- and Lorne crossed through the control room to meet him by the stairs as he approached for orders.

"We got a ping," Lorne told him, "so they're still on the planet. Past that, I can't tell you anything that's not already in the file."

This, too, was pretty par for the course. Kagan listened as Lorne gave him instructions regarding check-ins, what to do if there were hostiles (human or Wraith), and the usual likeliest scenarios. And then he nodded, promised to return with Sheppard, and went back down the stairs to his waiting marines. Lorne went back to the control room and told Nagley to dial the gate, an order the lieutenant passed on to the sergeant at the DHD.

And then they waited.

Rather than go all the way back to Little Tripoli, Lorne chose to go down to Medical and let Yoni know that he was going to be filling in for Beckett for a little while longer. He found Yoni in the infirmary badgering Nurse Tomita, a tiny Filipina who was completely unfazed by anything Yoni did or said. She shooed him away once she saw Lorne.

"I think you should give him his own off-world team," Yoni replied when told. "It took him three years, but he's finally developing a sense of adventure."

"Yoni!" Doctor Clayton chided from the nearby counter where she was measuring out some pink liquid that looked suspiciously like the bubblegum-flavored penicillin Lorne remembered from childhood. "Carson could be in serious trouble. You of all people shouldn't joke."

Lorne had heard the stories of Yoni's behavior when they'd been captured by the Genii. He was partially flattered and mostly relieved that he hadn't been there to either witness it or attempt to contain it.

"Of course he could be in serious trouble," Yoni agreed mildly, ignoring the reference. "He could be dead already and I would grieve the loss. But the fact is that he went willingly on this wild goose chase with Colonel Sheppard when it would once have taken an anxiolytic and a cattle prod to get him through the gate. I'm rather proud of him. At least until he misses the staff meeting."

Clayton shook her head and crouched down to be eye level with the meniscus.

"Who is out?" Yoni asked, all humor gone, once Clayton had left with her tray of pink medicines.

"Kagan," Lorne replied. Yoni nodded, as much acknowledgment as approval. "Still waiting for a report in beyond there being nothing at the gate."

It was another hour before Kagan's marines checked in again, a sergeant reporting that they'd heard a hail of gunfire from the town and gone in to check it out. Lorne was back in the control room by that point and went into Weir's office to tell her.

"It wouldn't be the Genii," she said, shaking her head. It's where Lorne's head had gone, too. They weren't the only option, but they were usually the most likely. "Radim isn't that stupid."

"He's not," Lorne agreed, "But he's also not fully in control of a well-armed, well-resourced, quasi-independent society with a large galactic footprint."

It turned out that they were both right, more or less. Kagan returned with Sheppard's team, whole and healthy if a little subdued, and it took one word to end all speculation.

"Kolya," Sheppard said with a grimace when Lorne and Weir came down to meet him by the stargate. "And Lucius, but mostly Kolya."

Weir took a deep breath before speaking, but Sheppard cut her off before she could get a word out. "I'm gonna go start writing this up. It's going to be messy and I want to do it before I start forgetting things."

He left them then, following his team to the armory to return their weapons.

Lorne and Weir watched him go, concerned.

"Major?" Weir began, then trailed off.

"Yeah," Lorne agreed, understanding the gist of what she hadn't wanted to ask out loud.

With operations mostly on their way to returning to normal, Lorne went back to his office. If Sheppard wanted to talk -- or, more likely, wanted a place to work undisturbed -- then he'd show up there. But he didn't and Lorne let the concerns of the battalion and his own AAR keep him occupied.

The next morning, there was a copy of an AAR on his desk. Printed out, since everyone knew he preferred things that way, and Lorne didn't even need to look at the headers to know whose it was or why he was being asked to read it.

Sheppard himself appeared mid-afternoon, sufficiently early for the battalion staff meeting that Lorne figured that he'd come to discuss the report, and dropped down into one of the chairs.

"I didn't have to shoot him," Sheppard said without preamble. "I knew the marines were incoming and Ronon could have stunned him."

In the AAR, Sheppard described a kind of Wild West showdown that he had won by outdrawing Kolya. Lorne didn't doubt that that was what had happened; Sheppard wouldn't lie to cover himself like that (he'd like to protect someone else, but not himself).

"You asked him to surrender," Lorne half-reminded and half-asked. Sheppard made a face and Lorne knew that _that_ was where the gray area was. "You gave him a chance to surrender," he amended.

Sheppard nodded. "He knew he was surrounded. I think he was daring us -- daring _me_ \-- to kill him."

"Not improbable," Lorne replied. He'd never encountered Kolya, never even seen the man (since he'd never watched the video of Sheppard's torture), but he'd read the files and didn't doubt it. "He was undoubtedly hoping to take you with him."

Another grimace. "Yeah," Sheppard agreed, reaching out to pick up the Rubik's Cube. He played with it for a long moment, almost long enough for Lorne to wonder if the conversation was over, if that confession was what Sheppard had needed to say, when Sheppard spoke again.

"I'm not sure I'm ever going to know how much of what I did or didn't do is because of what he did to me -- and what he did to my people -- and how much was just the way things unrolled," he said without looking up from the toy. "And it pisses me off that his death is going to linger when I've killed better people in murkier circumstances."

Lorne wondered if he was talking about Sumner or someone (someones) else from the mostly-classified career Sheppard had had before he'd heard of aliens. He also wondered if he was supposed to say something -- he certainly wasn't supposed to be offering absolution (Sheppard wasn't seeking it) and they both knew that he had no similar experiences to be able to truly empathize.

Loud voices, jocular voices, out in the hallway and if any of the three captains realized that they'd interrupted anything (whether they had or not was debatable), they would have been convinced otherwise by Sheppard holding up the Rubik's Cube and griping that Lorne was doing some sort of _Gaslight_ thing to make sure that he never solved the puzzle.

The AAR was finished the next day, but didn't go out for another month because such promptness would only have raised flags back on Earth.


	14. 3x14

  
M72-656 was turning out to be one of those worlds Lorne wished he had brought the jumper to explore. Mostly for cautionary reasons -- the local population was a bit better-armed than most and, judging from the relative lack of advancement of technology in their city, they spent a good deal more on defense than anything else. He had learned enough the hard way about people who had those kinds of priorities -- they tended to think the best defense was a good offense and were usually spoiling for a fight. Nothing had happened during the visit, but Lorne didn't think he was going to be comfortable until they were back to the stargate, which was still a couple of klicks away.

The other reason the jumper would have maybe been a good idea was that it would have kept all of his marines in earshot, if not arm's distance.

Squinting into the sun, Lorne sighed and tapped his radio. "Slow down, Reletti," he said, not for the first time today. "Not all of us are recon marines."

"Sorry, sir," came back, but the body language of figure in the distance was anything but apologetic.

"Who peed in his cornflakes?" Lorne asked, since while Reletti was walking point like he didn't want to be seen with anyone, everyone else was a few steps away in different directions.

Reletti had been a little off all day -- a little quieter, a little more withdrawn, and generally reserved in a way that Reletti normally was not. And the other two were leaving him be, which was unlike them, at least as far as Suarez went. The marines had few secrets and fewer sacred cows, which in practice made everything that went on in their daily lives in Atlantis fair game. The problem, Lorne suspected, was that that 'rule' had taken a beating by two months of lives lived apart from each other. The team dynamic had been fundamentally altered by their time on Earth and Lorne had accepted that as unavoidable and surmountable with time and patience. But this was maybe the first time that he wondered if something had changed that could not be fixed by waiting it out.

"Databurst is today, sir," Ortilla replied after a moment, hesitating because while almost everything was fair game among the marines, airing dirty laundry to the officers was something else. "I think he's expecting bad news."

Lorne felt Yoni's eyes upon him and met his gaze, shrugging slightly. He had no idea what it could be. It was too soon for news on the promotion front, although Lorne agreed with Polito that that was pretty much guaranteed and there'd been no Red Cross messages in the last databurst, although Reletti certainly could have gotten some news through personal email. But in that case, the other two would have known.

"Dear John letter?" he asked, not really expecting that to be the answer.

"He got that last year, sir," Suarez said from the rear. "He's not smooth enough to pick up a chick in the two weeks he was home. Well, maybe to pick up a chick, but not enough to pick up a chick who has to break up with him."

"A simple 'no' would have sufficed, Sergeant," Lorne said, trying to look serious. Yoni was making no such effort.

"Just trying to be thorough, sir," Suarez replied.

"That's what we're afraid of," Yoni told him.

Whatever it was, it was probably not that serious and definitely was speculation at this point, all of which meant that it could wait. The marines knew that they could come to him if they needed to, although they rarely ever did -- the senior NCOs fulfilled their shepherding and caretaking duties admirably.

They trudged along for another half-hour before Reletti -- who was staying at the far edge of 'close enough' -- called in on the radio. "Sir, we're being shadowed. I've got a posse -- can't tell how many -- in the trees on our two o' clock. I thought they were just out for a stroll, but they slowed down when I did."

Lorne looked around at the rest of the team. Ortilla gestured for Suarez to fall back a little further and unclipped his rifle. Yoni, who was on the right, took a quick look as he was ostensibly stretching his neck and then turned back to Lorne, nodding. All of them picked up the pace from a quick saunter to a more purposeful march.

"There's another group about two hundred meters behind us, sir," Suarez said. "Eight o' clock. They're armed."

"Wonderful," Lorne sighed, wishing he could be more surprised than he was. "Reletti, do we have any defensible positions we can get to without giving anything away?"

If they broke into a run, then the Gaorgi would know that their cover was blown and they could just start shooting at will. He'd rather save that until it was strictly necessary. He'd been looking around all along, as he suspected the others had, but there wasn't anything that they had passed that was still close enough.

"Defensible with any real expectation of safety? No, sir," Reletti answered. "There's a hill off to the side, about eleven o'clock, that will at least give us high ground if we can get to it first and there's no one on the other side. But it's not going to offer anything in the way of protection. If we haul serious ass, we can maybe get to the stargate. It's about half a klick away."

"We can do that, sir," Ortilla suggested. "There's always the chance that they're just trying to intimidate us and don't actually want to start anything."

Lorne cocked an eyebrow. "Do you really believe that, Staff Sergeant?"

"No, sir," Ortilla replied with a grimace. The Gaorgi had been uninterested in anything Atlantis had to offer except their weapons, which weren't for sale. "I think they want our lunch money and they'll do whatever they can to get it."

They came over the crest of the short incline they'd been walking up and could see the hill that Reletti had been talking about. Reletti himself was still a few meters ahead, but he'd dropped back and could now rejoin the group in a hurry if he needed to.

"The front group is closing in, sir," Reletti reported. "There's at least two dozen of them, all armed with those rifles they were showing us. If we're going to make for the gate, they're going to have to drop the shield for us without an IDC and we're probably still going to get lit up."

Lorne didn't want anyone getting shot. Those rifles were for use against the Wraith -- or any of the Gaorgi's many enemies. They shot cartridges the size of M203 grenades and while they didn't do as much damage as an M203, they did enough and, unlike many of the civilizations they'd encountered, the Gaorgi not only had developed their own firearms, but they'd also managed to make them reasonably accurate.

"We go for the hill," Lorne announced. Reletti was right -- there was no way they all made it to the stargate in one piece. "Reletti, can you get to the DHD and dial out? Don't stay, just dial and scram. I'll radio in."

Any advantage Reletti had had from being deployed while on Earth had long since been made up by everyone else. Suarez was the faster runner, but this was as much about guile as speed. He'd trust Suarez with this task, but he liked Reletti's odds more.

Reletti tilted his head thoughtfully for a second. "If I can make it to the trees, then I'm good, sir."

"Then make it to the trees," Lorne said. "Everyone else, we go to the hill on my mark. Three.... two... one... mark."

They ran -- head-down, full-bore, we-practice-sprints-with-full-gear-for-a-reason running. Lorne heard the first _pop_ of a rifle being fired, but no there was no _crack_ , no whistle that meant that the bullet was close. Up the hill, which was steep enough that he stumbled and he felt Ortilla grab on to the back of his vest and just yank, half-dragging him along until he found his feet again. With Suarez in the lead and Yoni following him, they dropped down and fast-crawled to the rear, up near the summit. Suarez was already firing, not so much putting his newly acquired sniper's skills to use as spraying the field to drive back the Gaorgi.

By the time Lorne stuck his head up far enough to take a look, the two groups of pursuers had joined forces and there was a sea of green-and-brown-clad soldiers. There were some casualties, but not enough to give the Gaorgi pause.

"Fuck," Ortilla sighed to Lorne's left, shifting so that he could make their left flank his target area. "Where did they all come from?"

The city had probably a couple thousand citizens, but Lorne guessed that every male of health and proper age was part of the military -- it may have been the only way to secure food for their families.

"This is a big turnout for a handful of P-90s," Yoni said from somewhere on the right. "Perhaps it is not all that they want."

The thought had crossed Lorne's mind. The Gaorgi had been much more interested in the fact that four of them were military on their world and all of them had come armed than in anything Lorne had said about cultural exchanges or commercial prospects. The leaders had asked about how they trained, what they used, and everything Lorne really wasn't prepared to talk about but was concerned he might have to at gunpoint.

Lorne waited for the volley of fire -- they were getting closer, if not yet close enough to fire directly and expect to hit anything -- before tapping his radio. "Reletti?"

"They've got three at the stargate, sir," Reletti replied after a long pause, voice pitched low and quiet. "Give me a minute."

Lorne was about to remind Reletti that he had permission to shoot if he needed, but then Suarez yelped and rolled over and Lorne watched as Yoni was on him in a flash, pulling him down toward the back of the hill, which was still safe for a little longer. Lorne moved up to take one of the empty firing positions, but he kept his ears open -- one for Reletti and the other on what was going on behind and below.

"You're fine," Yoni said after too long. Lorne could hear him ripping open bandages, so fine was probably a relative term. "It ricocheted off of your radio from above."

"Lucky fucker," Ortilla muttered quietly, opening up another three-shot burst. There were still a few dozen soldiers below and the shots were getting closer, if Suarez's ricochet were any indication. "Get your sniper-qualified ass up and firing, Suarez! Take a nap later."

A grunt of pain and acknowledgment from Suarez and Yoni shuffled back.

"Dialing now, sir," Reletti said.

"Good," Lorne answered. "Get through the wormhole if you can."

"I don't think I can hang around long enough for them to drop the shield, sir," Reletti answered, voice strained. "I'm about to be overrun.... Go ahead, sir."

Lorne couldn't hear anything over the radio from Atlantis when he tried to confirm audio, so he just spoke and hoped that Lieutenant Murray, the gate room officer, could hear him.

Their rear wasn't going to be safe for much longer -- the Gaorgi had realized that they were trapped on the hill and were effectively surrounded -- and Ortilla had shifted again to try to keep anyone from doing an end run and coming up behind them. Which is how he nearly ended up putting three shots into Reletti's chest.

"Warn us, you stupid fuck," Ortilla bit off, turning back to his position and Reletti finished scrabbling up the hill. "You know better than that."

"Sorry," Reletti muttered, catching his breath by inhaling deeply.

Lorne looked him over. "That yours?" he asked, gesturing to the blood on Reletti's hand.

"No, sir," Reletti replied, wiping it on his pants leg. "There's a second unit coming in from the other side."

"Fantastic," Lorne sighed. If reinforcements didn't show up soon, dinner was going to be in a prison cell -- he didn't think the Gaorgi were looking to kill them all, despite the high caliber weapons.

Reletti ended up sitting with his back to everyone to cover their back end. They were slowly losing the battle to keep the Gaorgi far enough away and they were starting to run very low on ammo. Suarez had already taken one of Reletti's extra clips by time Lorne heard music in his ears -- or close enough.

"Major?" Sheppard's voice came over the radio. "I've got a trunk full of marines and Lieutenant Kagan is securing the stargate. We'll be at your position in about a minute. Everyone still in one piece?"

Lorne knew that Sheppard could see the life signs on the HUD, but all that they would tell him was that the people on the ground were alive.

"For the time being, sir, but I'm not sure how much longer we're good to wait," he answered, since Ortilla had just announced that he was out of ammo; Lorne handed his P-90 over. "We're dry on rifle ammo."

"Understood," Sheppard said a the jumper appeared over the trees.

"What the _fuck_?"

Lorne was about to ask what Suarez had seen when it hit him -- it wasn't what he saw, but what he heard -- silence. The Gaorgi had stopped firing. Or, more precisely, stopped being _able_ to fire, since they were still very much trying to get shots off.

"What are the odds of an entire unit's rifles jamming simultaneously?" Yoni asked.

"Outside of a hand-to-hand training scenario?" Ortilla scoffed. "This is fucking weird."

"Stargate is ours, sir," Lieutenant Kagan announced on the radio. "Should we proceed to your position?"

"Negative, Lieutenant," Lorne replied, still watching the Gaorgi fight with their rifles. Clearing them wasn't as simple as it was on an M-16 or even a P-90, but they obviously had practiced. Whatever was happening, however, wasn't something they had trained to handle and some of them were starting to run away. "Hold where you are for now."

"Is the Colonel doing this, sir?" Suarez asked, transfixed. He'd pulled out his sidearm, as Lorne had.

"I don't think the puddle jumpers come with that kind of equipment," Lorne replied. The jumper was making a slow descent as Sheppard was looking for a place to set her down so that they could get to her safely. "At least I've never seen that option on the display."

"What about...." he trailed off, wiggling his hand a little.

"Do those look like Ancient weapons to you, you moron?" Reletti asked with a disbelieving snort. "Even then, he's not a fucking magician."

The rest of them laughed -- partially out of relief and mostly because it was funny.

They ran to the jumper the moment the hatch started to open, piling in and landing on the squad of marines who'd accompanied Sheppard's team in the jumper. As they lifted off, Sheppard told Kagan to dial home and return to Atlantis and they'd follow.

Ronon got up to let Lorne have his seat, but he waved the bigger man back down. It was going to be a short enough flight and he dealt with excess adrenaline better if he was standing and could move around a little.

"You can thank me any time, Major," McKay said from the shotgun seat.

"You didn't _do_ anything, Rodney," Sheppard sighed in annoyance. "Everyone good, Major?"

"Everyone's fine, sir," Lorne replied.

"Thanks to me," McKay insisted.

Lorne looked over at Teyla, who looked up with an expression Lorne recognized as one of hard-won patience. He cocked an eyebrow and she grinned back.

They were back to Atlantis in a flash, floating up into the bay and exiting the jumper in no time. Doctor Weir was waiting with Zelenka and Beckett showed up with gurneys shortly thereafter. Lorne assured him that they were all fine, but it took Yoni's more forceful insistence to convince Beckett that the emergency care was unwarranted. Suarez followed Yoni down to the infirmary anyway, to get the graze cleaned properly, but Ortilla and Reletti were there to watch McKay prove that maybe he'd had something to do with their safe return after all.


	15. Chapter 15

"Anything we need to discuss before the kiddies show up?"

Lorne looked at his watch. The staff meeting was scheduled for a half-hour from now, so Sheppard was here either to reread the material under discussion or wanted to go off and do something that would probably take forty minutes. "Only unless you want to talk about whether we are letting Nagley and Cardejo loose upon the galaxy."

The two new lieutenants had been kept on fairly short leashes so far -- milk runs (actual milk runs, not the sort of milk runs that turned into hostage situations) and internal security, but not escorting civilian missions or serving as the quick reaction force in the ready rooms. But it had been a month already and both Polito (Nagley) and Hanzis (Cardejo) had agreed that it was past time to get both platoons back in the regular rotation. Lorne was inclined to agree with them and thought Sheppard did, too.

Sheppard shrugged against the doorway he was leaning against. He wasn't carrying his laptop, which meant that he was going to disappear until the meeting. "If Polito and Hanzis are fine with it, then I'm fine with it. Maybe Nagley's a little less..." he trailed off, making a vague gesture with his hand that Lorne understood completely because he'd wondered the same thing, " in the field."

"We hope," Lorne answered with a grin. Nagley was a good guy and Polito seemed to think he'd work out. He had Paik's old platoon and those guys were probably used to a commander who was a little on the flaky side, except Nagley didn't have the excuse of being a moonlighting jet fighter pilot.

"I'll be back," Sheppard said, pointing over his shoulder and then pushing off the doorway and heading off.

Lorne went back to his notes, then took one final read-through of the mission plan he'd written up for his team's next sojourn before submitting it. (The paperwork was purely for posterity and the SGC; Sheppard never read them, instead showing up at Lorne's office, asking a few questions, and then granting permission with an exhortation to bring back everyone he left with.)

Suarez hadn't missed any time with the graze wound, but there'd been a gap since the last adventure -- mostly because Charlie Company was virtually shorthanded with Nagley's platoon unable to perform certain duties and the other two were compensating. But with things returning to normal, there was no time like the present to get out and see the sights. Lorne wasn't the only member of the team to be getting a little antsy to escape the city for a while, although he suspected Yoni was just feeling a little persecuted because (according to Beckett) Clayton was becoming good friends with Keller and that meant one more doctor unintimidated by Yoni's bark and growl. Carson thought it was prime entertainment, or at least some much-needed comeuppance for Yoni, but for Lorne it meant pointed questions about when they were next taking the (devil) dogs for a walk.

With ten minutes to go, the marines started filing in. Hanzis, because he was always the earliest, then Polito because he was closest and First Sergeant Backman had probably punted him out of his own office, then Radner with Kagan tagging along because it was Kagan's turn to be Logistics Officer. Sheppard returned just after everyone got through giving the notoriously-bad-with-paperwork Kagan the business about irony and getting all of his stuff ready for the databurst -- and had a look about him that made Lorne think that he'd gone off to _nap_ for half an hour. Which wasn't anything to criticize and something Lorne had done in the middle of the day once or twice (or more).

The meeting itself was mercifully brief -- not short, but at least briskly efficient. There'd been a rash of frontier spirit down in the Science Division the previous week and the marines had hauled half a dozen civilians back in from parts of the city that they weren't supposed to be in alone. Sheppard promised to speak to McKay about it, along with some newly created 'rule' about not letting the marines do their patrols through the hallways by the ATA labs if it was during business hours. ("It means they're either building something or testing something they know we're gonna stop, sir," Hanzis reported with a sigh. "I'd rather find out what it is before they blow up half the city.")

Kagan ended up following Lorne back to his office because he needed some hard copies of old reports that nobody could find on the server (Lorne took the opportunity to be smug in front of everyone before agreeing to retrieve them).

"You going to have everything done by Thursday?" Lorne asked, flipping through the files in the cabinet. Murphy's Law dictated that they would be on the bottom.

"Yes, sir," Kagan replied, a disembodied voice from somewhere above. "Gunny Nicholls won't let me screw this up. Made me do all of the spreadsheets and then write a nice letter to my brother."

Lorne found the file and stood up carefully. "You need to be reminded to write a letter home?"

Kagan wasn't spacey like Nagley, but he was certainly a little offbeat. "No, sir," he replied with a grin, accepting the file Lorne held out. "Little showoff got into Harvard early and Gunny said that that deserved more than a 'nice job, dipshit' email. Especially since he's going ROTC. He has to do it at MIT 'cause Harvard doesn't like military, but I've still got four years to convince him to join the Corps."

Lorne smiled in return. "Instead of the Air Force?"

Kagan looked aghast for all of half a second, which Lorne interpreted as equivalent to a confession, and then shook his head. "I'll be a captain by the time he's commissioned, sir," Kagan said instead. "I want to improve my chances of being able to order him around and him not being able to run to Mom and complain."

Lorne shook his head in amusement, then thought of something. "Colleges are announcing who gets in now?"

It had been too long since Lorne had done his own eager rain dances around the mailbox for him to remember. But if it was, it would explain the mood swings of one particular sergeant. ("I think there was some sort of _Freaky Friday_ thing that went on back on Earth, sir," Suarez confided. "We didn't get Reletti back. We got one of his sisters in his body and he's back in Arizona trying to figure out how to put a bra on instead of taking it off.")

"Depends, sir," Kagan answered. "If you're applying early, then yeah. Most of it happens in the spring, though."

A few minutes later, Kagan took the file and swore to return it intact and Lorne went back to his desk to work and wonder where Reletti had been accepted that he'd gone from despondent to giddy in the space of a day.

* * *

  
"This year, Sergeant!" Lorne called over his shoulder. "I'd like to get out and back before the next Wraith visit."

A muffled reply, since Suarez undoubtedly had his head deep into one of the bins.

"Want me to get him, sir?" Ortilla asked with maybe a little too much eagerness.

"Give him another minute," Lorne replied. "I'd rather leave five minutes late than listen to him bitch all afternoon."

Missions that involved puddle jumpers had special requirements and one of them was Lorne making sure that all unnecessary irritants were avoided. The ride would be enough like a minivan full of elementary schoolers as it was.

Suarez appeared, adjusting the velcro on one his vest pockets. "Sorry, sir," he said and Lorne might have believed him if they hadn't been reliving this scenario every mission for the last two years.

"You want some flying practice, Sergeant?" Lorne asked as they made their way to the jumper bay.

"No!" Ortilla and Suarez chorused in unison. Reletti flipped them the bird, but said he'd rather wait for the return trip if that was all right. Lorne said it was, figuring he'd get someone to help Reletti with his landings some after when his teammates wouldn't be around to give him shit the entire time.

"Does the database have _anything_ on this place, sir?" Ortilla asked as he sat in the co-pilot's seat. Two years and they all had their 'spots' -- nobody even commented about Reletti's sitting in the rear compartment anymore (when he wasn't flying, in which case it was Suarez's spot).

Ortilla knew the answer was no, but he had maybe too much faith in Lorne's ability to pull something out of nothing.

"Not even sure the place is inhabited," Lorne replied, feeling the jumper's momentary confusion before Reletti did whatever he did to tell the jumper not to pay attention to him and instead focus on Lorne. Snowball was a bit of a snob that way. "It was ten thousand years ago, but...."

But ten thousand years was a long time and they'd all gotten used to how out of date the database was. M4D-058 had a space gate and it probably hadn't seen human footsteps in millennia.

"Flight, this is Jumper Two," Lorne said into his radio. "Our trays are up and our seat backs are in the upright position."

Once they had clearance from Doctor Zigmanis, Lorne let Snowball take them down through the bay floor and into a hover as Ortilla dialed the gate. In the control room, Lorne could see an annoyed Doctor Yee glaring at the jumper, a tiny, angry form next to the lanky Lieutenant Osgeny.

"What did you do now, Doc?" Suarez asked cheerfully, watching Yee watch them as the jumper turned slowly toward the stargate.

Yoni, who had probably not even looked up from the tablet he was reading, made a dismissive sound. "Nothing that wasn't deserved."

(Yoni always brought his own entertainment on jumper trips; always something to read and, if the ride was going to be longer than an hour, his iPod. While Lorne encouraged the marines to take their iPods on long trips, too, he still felt slightly abandoned by Yoni's withdrawal from the world on even the shorter trips.)

"As long as there isn't an armed guard to take you down to the brig on our return," Lorne sighed, accelerating into the wormhole.

Nobody got a chance to comment. Once they were through the gate, something else distracted them completely.

"Are those _satellites_ , sir?" Ortilla asked, surprised.

"Apparently," Lorne replied, bringing the jumper to a near-standstill. There were maybe a half-dozen small satellites at a distance from the planet that Lorne knew from Milky Way experience was close enough to be for anything from cell phones to weapons.

"A planet with space capabilities would certainly be a change," Yoni said. Out of the corner of his eye, Lorne could see him stowing his tablet. "On the other hand, if we haven't encountered them yet, there may be a good reason why."

"Not every advanced civilization is out to get us, Doc," Reletti said from the bulkhead doorway. This was an old argument and neither Yoni nor Reletti had agreed to disagree.

"That's 'cuz you don't remember us having to drag your sorry ass around Thador," Suarez retorted.

"What 'we', Kemosabe?" Ortilla asked. "I seem to remember you walking point while Ronon and I shlepped him around."

Yoni grinned, presumably at the proper use of Yiddish rather than at the memories of that hellish fortnight.

"Well, let's take a closer look," Lorne said, urging the jumper forward and toward the planet. He pulled up the display to make sure the shield was working properly -- if those satellites were defensive -- but since it was in Ancient, only Reletti knew what he'd done.

The satellites weren't weapons -- or if they were, they didn't recognize the jumper as hostile. Lorne figured it was the former and switched the shield off and the cloak on; most people automatically assumed a flying ship was Wraith and Lorne didn't want to make any bad first impressions.

There were life signs on the other side of the planet and Lorne followed them, aware that the bickering and usual jumper ride amusements had fallen away and that his team was back in a more professional mode.

"The _fuck_?" Ortilla half-exclaimed as they came upon where the life signs should be.

"Maybe it's another place that's got the satellites," Reletti suggested as they passed over thatch huts and the sorts of simple villages that were the standard for Pegasus.

"Or it could be like that place where they kidnapped Colonel Sheppard to make ATA-enhanced babies," Yoni put in and everyone else laughed. "All of the wealth in one place."

"Or it could be like Thador and it's just bullshit while they hide the real city," Suarez said.

"Can you stop dwelling on that for a second, dude?" Reletti asked plaintively.

Lorne followed the river for a while, then took the jumper in for a landing about half a kilometer from the nearest of the group of villages. They put on their gear as the ramp dropped and nobody joked at the extra preparations made.

Reletti walked point -- close enough to be able to fall back, not like his Greta Garbo routine from the last mission -- and Suarez was tail-end charlie and the rest of them kept their eyes open because Thador was on all of their minds no matter how much they wished to forget it.

"Holy _fuck_!" Reletti's whispered voice came over the radio. "Sir, you're not going to believe this."

Lorne looked at Ortilla, then at Yoni. "What is it, Sergeant?"

"I think we've walked in to Doctor McKay's fantasy," Reletti replied.

Confused and concerned, Lorne moved up to where Reletti had found a hiding spot behind a low wall, the others crowding in behind him except for Ortilla, who was too big to completely obscure himself and stood by a large tree instead.

What he saw wasn't what he expected -- McKay's fantasy would have been ZPMs growing on trees or a village made up entirely of Ancient technology. This wasn't any of that -- it was just what it looked like from the air: another primitive world.

"The flags, sir," Reletti said quietly, gesturing toward the buildings. "The one with the red stripes."

Lorne followed Reletti's finger. "Holy fuck," he murmured.

The flag had a portrait of McKay on it. All of them did. And it wasn't just some strong resemblance -- it was _McKay_.

"If he's got a twin who is a local despot," Yoni said from Lorne's other side, "We will never hear the end of it and I will go back to Earth to avoid it."

"You and me both." Lorne shook his head, unable to look away. A blonde woman walked by carrying a rolled-up scroll of vellum or maybe parchment. They held their breaths and stayed still as she passed unaware.

"Reletti," he began, turning to the sergeant. "Go back to the jumper and dial Atlantis. I think we're going to want to send some video footage home."

A slightly wicked grin and a muttered "aye aye, sir" and he was off.

"Suarez, you are playing videographer," Lorne continued. "Get up here and start filming."

Suarez pulled his video camera out of his vest as he shuffled forward on his knees. Behind them, Ortilla kept watch, one hand on his rifle.

"Maybe he's a figurehead," Yoni murmured. "An inbred idiot, like the Habsburgs after they married their cousins too many times. _That_ would be worth staying for."

"Or an evil twin," Suarez suggested, fiddling with the settings.

"No goatee," Ortilla said.

It took only a couple of minutes before Reletti could be heard over the radio talking to Atlantis and telling them that Lorne wanted to send video to Doctor McKay.


	16. 3x16: As Ye Sow

  
"And you thought this was a good idea _why_?" Lorne asked as he pinched the bridge of his nose. It wasn't actually going to stave off the headache, but it did help a little with the sinus pressure. Between his lingering allergies from Planet Ragweed and the incipient migraine from the steaming piles of shit that were going to have to be cleaned up after Weapons Company _intentionally_ blew up a building in Atlantis, Lorne needed all of the help he could get.

"Colonel Sheppard agreed when I proposed it, sir," Hanzis said and Lorne opened his eyes to glare since they both knew exactly how much of a justification _that_ was. The captains were fiercely protective of Sheppard when it came to interference and pressure from without, but they were not above taking advantage of him -- or at least taking advantage of his sense of whimsy and love of the _fun_ parts of being in the military (namely, access to toys that went _boom_ ). Especially when doing so meant a successful end run around Lorne, who was seemingly the officer responsible for common sense in Little Tripoli.

"Mike," he sighed, the plaintive tone wiped out by a sneeze. Fucking ragweed; they'd been there for six hours three days ago and he was still breathing through one nostril. "Of _course_ he was going to go along with it. You probably had him at 'controlled demo'. And none of that would have even mattered if you'd just put more care into deciding on a target. Did you even _look_ at the list of buildings G-2 wanted to go through?"

"It was on the list of unsafe buildings, sir," Hanzis replied, which was equivalent to a 'no' and Lorne took that as such. The building, a fairly small thing out by the west pier, had taken heavy damage during the Replicator assault on the city and it had already seen damage from the Wraith siege two years previous. That Weapons Company had chosen it for an exercise -- an exercise essentially mandated by Marine Corps brass back on Earth (who were worried that Atlantis was turning a Weapons Company into an engineering unit, which they kind of were) -- was neither illogical nor, on the face of it, anything less than pragmatic. Except for the fact that G-2 had asked three different times for permission to make the place safe enough for exploration by the archaeologists and architects and had been turned down every time because of "higher priority activities".

"Well, congratulations," Lorne said. "You've just volunteered your marines for the half-dozen time-wasting missions we're going to have to accept from G-2 to soothe ruffled feathers over you blowing up their 'gold mine of information.' Next time you get the urge to stay local with the exercises, do everyone a favor and consider the long-term effects of short-term entertainment?"

"Yes, sir," Hanzis said contritely, standing up because that was effectively a dismissal. "I'm sorry, sir."

"Make sure the paperwork for Quantico is ready for the next databurst," Lorne said, then blew his nose again as Hanzis left. He had gotten allergy medicine from Medical, but hadn't taken any of it yet. It was a lingering distaste from his pilot days, when a couple of Benadryls would have him too wired to sleep and so twitchy that long hours in the cockpit were sheer hell.

A half-hour later, when Doctor Weir radioed to tell him that Hanzis wasn't the only officer who'd let his inner three-year-old rule, Lorne gave up and took the blue capsules Abelard had given him. He'd be twitchy anyway and it wasn't like he was going to be getting any sleep any time soon.

* * *

  
"...I don't know if you can hear me but it looks like I'm gonna have to ride this one down."

_Oh, Christ. Not again._

Lorne was practically vibrating in place from the damned antihistamines (although he'd accept that tradeoff for being able to breathe the canned air inside the space suit), was surprisingly sore from working the blowtorch, and could now add nausea to the mix because he was really getting fucking sick of sitting in a jumper watching Sheppard try to kill himself.

Thankfully, suicide was one skill Sheppard had yet to properly master -- although McKay made it very clear that he was getting far too good at it for anyone's taste. They found him standing rubber-legged by the storage device, anxious for McKay to tell him that it was still functioning and Teyla was fine. McKay could do the former but not the latter and that had to be good enough for now. It was enough to get Sheppard to allow himself to be guided back to the jumper, at least, leaving Lorne with an injured Ronon and McKay to figure out what to do with the storage device.

Once everyone was back to the jumper with Beckett still fussing over Sheppard -- who was a little groggy although probably not concussed ("Hard head, Doc." "No shit." "Thanks, Rodney. You still owe me.") -- Lorne had kept himself busy and distracted by organizing the rescue of the 'stored' people. Everyone was worried about Teyla, despite the fact that she'd been scoopy-beamed and rematerialized once already. Nobody knew what Jamus had or hadn't done before he'd made her disappear.

There was a combination of resigned distaste and a little disbelieving awe -- more the former than the latter after a few years in this merciless galaxy -- in the reaction to the history of Jamus's people. They weren't the first people to sacrifice the many to improve the odds of the few, but the scale of it was still a little mind-blowing. Not that sacrificing hundreds was any better, but intentionally nuking hundreds of _thousands_ of your own people to deke out the Wraith... ("Maybe that's why the Wraith believed we'd done it," McKay had mused aloud, tone bleak. "We wouldn't have been the first.") Neither Lorne nor Sheppard said as much, but Lorne knew that it was probably a factor in their decision to re-materialize everyone on their home world rather than bring them back to Atlantis to ease their way back into three dimensions. This wasn't a people who deserved cosseting and it was for Teyla's sake that they chose to wait until they had additional equipment support before effecting the rematerialization, which meant dragging the module back to Atlantis _anyway_ to analyze it.

By the time Captain Allen (an X-302 pilot from the _Daedalus_ who'd been loaned to them as a replacement for Paik in the jumper pilot rotation until they could adequately train Lieutenant Cardejo) got them back to Atlantis, the preparations had been finalized and the various teams -- medical, engineering, marines -- were waiting. Cardejo ended up driving one of the jumpers anyway, since it required a veritable space convoy to get everyone back to the planet. Still a little twitchy, Lorne was happy to end up driving Bessie and to have Medical staff who liked to doze on long car rides as his companions. And McKay, but Rodney was clearly drained from the day already and was quiet as he prepared for the task ahead.

They landed on a part of the planet that was less barren than the moonlike surface where they'd found Sheppard -- there was nothing remaining of any kind of advanced civilization, no cities reduced to rubble, no nothing. Time and what had probably been an extreme case of overestimation on the bomb payloads had erased everything and this world that had sacrificed so much to save so little would be starting from nothing. One of the scientists was taking soil samples to see if there was even enough nitrogen in the ground to grow anything.

"It's kind of like last time all over again, sir," Suarez said as they watched McKay harass the engineers setting up the rematerialization equipment. "Except hopefully we won't find ourselves getting chased by Wraith and scoopy-beamed again."

Patchok's platoon was providing security, so with Yoni leading the medical team it was almost as if Lorne had brought his team along. Which was probably for the best because the marines were feeling a little slighted that he hadn't brought them along in the first place despite the fact that they knew very well that two teams did not fit happily in one jumper.

"These people pretty much brought it on themselves," Reletti said, not looking up from where he was fiddling with his thigh holster. "The Hadrapu almost getting wiped out was at least partly our fault."

Staff Sergeant Gustafson's squad was unpacking flats of bottled water and cases of MREs; Atlantis wasn't going to do much for these people, but some minimal level of support was obviously necessary. While it sounded like most of the people collected in the storage device had been handpicked for their usefulness in recreating their world's society, there were also a couple of hundred children and no guarantee that even all of the adults had been willing parties to a scheme that had included their great-grandparents.

"Who the fuck sacrifices their kids -- and their kids' kids, and _their_ kids' kids -- for a snowball's chance in hell?" Ortilla asked, returning from where he'd been organizing security with Patchok, Gunny Haumann, and the other squad leaders. "What kind of fucked-up greater good is that, sir?"

"This is Pegasus," Lorne replied, which was both an answer and an excuse. "Moderation went out of style ten thousand years ago."

How much it went out of fashion in modern-day Atlantis was occasionally a reason for concern.

For better or for worse, they were getting pretty good at the rematerialization business. Even though the technology was different, it didn't take long until McKay was yelling at Yoni to get his people in place. Then some buttons were pushed and ten thousand and two people were suddenly where nothing had been before.

Rematerialization was still pretty much a high-tech overturning of a bucket full of people, so it took time and sharp eyes and strong backs to undo the tangled mass of humanity and triage the recovered -- and find Teyla. The changes in the Wraith process had kept the patterns stable for millennia, but with a cost. There were the usual sorts of after-effects -- rapid heartbeats, dehydration, lethargy -- that came with the process and they were prepared to handle those. But in addition to the expected grogginess, there was a more profound and pervasive memory loss -- a lot of people had no idea where they were or why -- and one fatality. When asked, Keller couldn't say she was sure that they would have been able to save Jamus if they'd done the rematerialization in Atlantis. But they had to watch him die anyway and Lorne felt both guilt and vague irritation that he did so with a smug and satisfied smile on his lips.

Lorne was already starting to sneeze again by the time the marines began packing up for the trip home ("still with the allergies, sir?" Reletti -- who hadn't even _noticed_ the ragweed -- asked, all solicitous concern). They were leaving the people with tents and camping supplies and food and water and would be returning with more, but right now it was time to get Teyla (who seemed fine, albeit weak) back to Atlantis and figure out what sort of long-term aid would or wouldn't be forthcoming. For all of the creepy eugenics and self-inflicted genocide that had brought these people to where and when they were, they weren't a completely bad lot -- nobody could ignore the profound sense of guilt and despair that clung to the survivors. How could you gracefully handle the burden of their forebears' sacrifice that had been placed on their shoulders? Everyone had lost family, friends, loved ones -- parents, siblings, children, spouses -- and though the losses were millinnia old, they were still immediate and fresh to the survivors.

The ride home was subdued. They already knew that Teyla was being kept for observation only for precautionary measures and Sheppard had passed his scan with no trouble, although Doctor Weir had postponed any discussion about what to do with the survivors until tomorrow. Lorne let Patchok supervise the unpacking and the rest of the end-of-mission business; he went downstairs to check in with Weir and then back to his office to wait out the last of the antihistamine euphoria.


	17. 3x17: To Wellington Barracks

  
Lorne was looking over the list in his hand, trying to figure out the best way to pick everything up so that he didn't get caught in traffic more than once, when he heard his name being called.

"Heading out?" Mitchell asked as he jogged to catch up, gesturing toward the elevator Lorne was standing in front of. Mitchell, like Lorne, was dressed in civvies and was probably on his way home. "They putting you guys up at Peterson?"

"Yes and no," Lorne replied with a frown. "General Landry's not letting Ronon upstairs, so everyone's staying here, too. Except Doctor Cole, but I think she wanted to be by herself anyway."

Cole was a visiting scholar, an old friend of Carson's who'd come to Atlantis for a few months to work on some project; she was going to Scotland with McKay.

"So you're on the food run?" Mitchell gestured at the papers in Lorne's hand, one of which was the address of the restaurant Sheppard had ordered dinner from. Lorne had volunteered ostensibly because he had the best local knowledge of the area and Sheppard was the best candidate to keep Ronon out of trouble (and McKay needed to verify his travel arrangements and nobody wanted to let Zelenka drive). But the truth of it was that Lorne wanted to be on the surface for a little while, away from the hermetically sealed world of the SGC with its whispered rumors and questioning looks from the Earth-based personnel and the guilt and awkwardness of the men he'd come back with.

"If I can get a car out of Visitor Services," Lorne confirmed. His own was in long-term storage and there was no point in getting it out for such a short stay.

"I'll take you around if you want," Mitchell offered, entering the elevator once the doors opened. "You have a better chance of getting Ronon off-base than a car -- there's some NATO conference going on. I'm surprised they even offered you rooms."

"You sure?" Lorne asked, following him into the elevator. Mitchell nodded as he pressed the button. "Then thank you very much."

Lorne hadn't been back in Atlantis long enough to have forgotten the eighty billion steps required to leave the SGC and then Cheyenne Mountain and then the complex as a whole. Finally they were pulling out of the security gate and hanging a left.

"Anywhere else you need to go?" Mitchell asked at the first red light.

"I've got a couple of wish lists that are going to have me running around in Walmart looking like an idiot for an hour or two in the morning," Lorne replied, not wanting to take advantage of Mitchell's generosity. "Gonna have to get it all delivered anyway."

No matter the reason for their return to Earth, they were still on Earth and that meant an opportunity to fill the needs and desires for equipment (and the occasional luxury) that couldn't -- or wouldn't -- be met by those charged with supplying Atlantis. Pegasus had taught them nothing so well as how to multitask their grief, so it didn't even feel a little wrong to be working out what they could wedge into the rear of the jumper that was coming to retrieve them tomorrow. McKay and Zelenka had their own lists -- Rodney would be on Earth for a week -- but Lorne and Sheppard wanted to get Little Tripoli whatever they could.

"Let me know if you need anything," Mitchell replied and Lorne nodded in thanks. "We're not going anywhere for at least another couple of days and, frankly, I'd love any excuse to get out from under the mountain for a while. Don't know why this place bothers me more than being stuck in a space ship for weeks on end ever did."

"It's under ground," Lorne said, mostly to say something. "Even in hyperspace, you still know you're flying."

Mitchell had been helpful when they'd come back to Earth last time, confused and aching from the loss of their city and the lives they'd built there. All of SG-1 had, each in their own ways. It was more than just simple repayment for being amenable hosts during their visit out to Atlantis, but Lorne was in the wrong frame of mind to put any more thought to it than he already had. You accepted help when you needed it, offered it when you could give it. Simple as that.

"Probably," Mitchell agreed, muttering a curse as he had to brake sharply to avoid a careless driver stopping to make a left turn without signaling.

They were quiet for a while, sitting in traffic that was undoubtedly worse because of whatever NATO was bringing in to town.

"Everyone was expecting Doctor Safir to be part of the escort," Mitchell said at yet another backed-up red light.

Lorne chuffed an unamused laugh. "Yeah, we know," he sighed. And everyone, both here and in Atlantis, seemed to think that Lorne was the person to talk to about that -- Landry hadn't even bothered asking Sheppard. "I don't think Yoni felt up to dealing with everything here."

It was both an evasion and what Lorne best guessed was the truth after half a dozen migraine-inducing attempts to try to talk to the man. Carson's death had hit Yoni very hard -- in addition to fighting the same guilt that the rest of them were battling, Yoni also had to deal with the fact that he had inherited Carson's job. Yoni was an able, if extremely reluctant, administrator, but dealing with bureaucracy never brought out his most civil traits. Couple that with the raw grief of losing the man who had probably been his closest friend in Atlantis... Lorne had never seen Yoni this tightly wound, this obviously waiting for a pretext and a convenient target. It had been hard enough to get Yoni to go to the funeral -- he'd reduced Clayton to frustrated tears more than once in the interim between Carson's death and the event itself -- and Lorne was maybe a bit relieved that Yoni hadn't come to Earth. The meeting with the IOA to confirm Yoni's status as new CMO in Atlantis would have been a recipe for disaster.

"Don't blame him," Mitchell said with knowing sourness, hitting his turn signal. Lorne could see the sign for the restaurant up ahead on the right. It was a steakhouse; they'd figured Ronon could discover pizza not made by marines and Chinese takeout tomorrow. "Woolsey and company were looking forward to a coronation; fuckers forgot that someone had to die first before they could throw a party. The king is dead, long live the king and all, but sometimes you have to wonder."

The order was waiting for them, a couple of bags' worth of foil containers and Lorne felt his stomach rumble at the scent. They made a pit-stop for a selection of Earth beers and then Mitchell brought him back to the complex. Lorne offered a place at the table -- there was certainly enough food -- but Mitchell understood that the offer was made more to be polite and wished him goodnight instead.

Dinner was subdued, but only for the first little while. Enough real, fresh Earth beef (not freeze-dried for transport aboard the _Daedalus_ ) and professionally made beer and they relaxed enough to debate whether the mashed potatoes and onion rings were better here (the Atlantis marines had a limited repertoire, but anything involving deep-frying or potatoes or -- especially -- both was expertly produced) and from there they segued into reminiscences of Carson. There'd been a wake in Medical, but only Rodney had gone and so they had their own little version in a windowless suite in the depths of the SGC. Misadventures both within Atlantis and without, stories from Antarctica, from the various times they'd come back to Earth, the first time they'd ever met the man (unsurprisingly, Ronon's introduction wasn't the most shocking). It was a good way to end the day, laughing over stories some of which Lorne didn't think had ever been told.

Lorne was still working out how he felt -- or didn't feel. He had the same woulda-coulda-shoulda guilt as everyone else -- if he'd agreed to go with Carson, Carson would have still been alive -- but it wasn't of a strength or magnitude to rival McKay's and Lorne didn't think it was worth trying to compare. Also, something Clayton had said stuck with him -- Carson obviously hadn't wanted to die, but he'd gone pretty much as he would have wished -- saving the life of his patient and saving the lives of his staff. It was an honorable death and in Pegasus, where too many people died in circumstances bereft of either meaning or dignity, that counted for something.

* * *

  
"You're _what_?" Lorne didn't feign his surprised slide off of the stool.

"I don't want this job on a permanent basis and I don't think anyone else wants me to have it, either," Yoni continued as if he were not proposing anything more exciting than changing his lab schedule. "I'm going to suggest an election next week, once everyone has calmed down a little. Let someone else serve as interim head until Doctor Weir and the IOA can come up with a permanent appointment."

Lorne climbed back up on the stool. "Are you sure? I'm pretty sure everyone's expecting you to get the appointment."

The official approval had already come, although Yoni didn't know that he was no longer _acting_ CMO. Doctor Weir was sitting on it, not wanting to deliver the news before it was ready to be heard. Also, apparently the original message had apparently been a little too upbeat and she was waiting for an official rephrasing before passing it on.

Yoni shook his head and made a face. "I don't want it. Carson spent most of his time being a bureaucrat and a babysitter. His research suffered, his blood pressure suffered, and he was becoming very frustrated with how little time he spent actually being a _scientist_. His galavanting around the galaxy was as much a response to that as anything else."

It was weird hearing Beckett spoken about in the past tense and Lorne didn't miss the way Yoni hesitated just a fraction of a second before remembering to do so. A week wasn't enough time and Yoni hadn't taken a day off.

"If I got the job permanently, I'd have to choose between the team and my responsibilities here," Yoni went on, gesturing around him. "We haven't been off-world since Carson's death, nobody's needed coverage, and I'm still swamped. I had a hard enough time managing my normal obligations and Carson did the lion's share of the administrative work."

"McKay manages," Lorne offered, knowing that Yoni was right but feeling obligated to protest anyway. "I manage." Since there was no point in using Sheppard as the example.

"McKay micromanages the units he's interested in and leaves Zelenka to tend the rest," Yoni scoffed. "And you have relatively obedient subordinates accustomed to bureaucracy. This is herding cats and I have no reservoir of goodwill to rely on the way Carson did. Besides, I came to Atlantis because I wanted to do fieldwork. If I'm going to be an administrator, I can go back to Earth and enjoy the benefits of living there and not have to worry about Wraith or Replicators or exploding tumors."

The last had been spat out bitterly. Yoni had been off-world when everything had gone to hell, one of a large group of marines and civilians who had gone to M4R-629 to enjoy their day off away from the city. It was mostly a beach planet, where they sent the marines as a reward (or a bribe), and uninhabited except for some exotic birds and fish. Weir had sent Gillick to retrieve Yoni and the other doctors after the accident.

"Do whatever you're comfortable doing," Lorne said, holding his hands up in surrender and defense. Personally, he'd rather have Yoni on his off-world team than as CMO, but saying so seemed self-serving even though it was what Yoni wanted, too. He wasn't even sure Weir or the IOA would go along with any decision to abdicate -- the IOA wasn't exactly flexible and accommodating with its civilian personnel -- but it seemed pointless to bring that up. He'd rather have Yoni as CMO than quitting the Stargate Program entirely out of spite and anger. Which was a distinct possibility.

A couple of days later, Yoni nearly did just that -- according to Sheppard (who'd come to Lorne's office to gossip), Yoni told Doctor Weir that she could either accept an election or make her own choice for CMO, but he was going to request a transfer back to Earth if he had to continue in the post. A week after that, Jennifer Keller was chosen as interim CMO, with Yoni remaining deputy head of the unit. Whether she got the job because she didn't know to campaign against it or because she was low man on the totem pole was the subject of some debate, but (as Doctor Weir had pointed out) Carson had fought hard to get her to Atlantis in the first place and she'd handled all of the weird shit so far. Keller took the news about as well as could be expected -- she panicked a bit, yelled at Yoni at lot, and let Clayton take her cliff diving on the mainland since breaking her neck might qualify as an improvement in her situation. Lorne figured she'd do just fine.


	18. 3x18: Chasing Ishmael

  
"Hey."

Lorne looked up from his desk. Sheppard was standing in the doorway, just his head and one arm visible. "Heading off, sir?"

They didn't do any formal handing over of authority here and, technically, with everyone's calendars available on the network and a city that could find people on its own, even an informal announcement of departure or arrival was unnecessary. But it was something they did nonetheless, an acknowledgment that this was a dangerous place and shit happened. Which was why they usually said hello and goodbye face-to-face, saving the radioed messages for emergencies and odd hours.

(The main entrance to the civilians' gym was open again as of last Monday, although the under-repair scorch-marked walls were still hidden by plastic sheeting; most everyone was still going over to Little Tripoli or to one of the rooms opened to serve in the interim. Beckett and Hewston had been dead less than a month and the wounds were still raw in Atlantis. The hallway outside of the medical suites had never been closed -- too busy, too integral -- but the marines had worked nearly nonstop for days to quickly erase the visible reminders. The hall now smelled more of cleaning solution than anything else, the faint undercurrent of chemicals from both the research labs and the infirmary everpresent as always and the lingering reminders of the explosion mostly imagined. Nonetheless, that there hadn't been any meat other than in stews or baked dishes in the kitchens -- the smell always carried into the commissary and the halls -- was unsurprising and unremarked upon.)

"Yeah," Sheppard sighed. "I get the feeling I'm going to regret this -- it's got all of the makings of a Pegasus take on _Moby Dick_ and McKay makes a crappy Ahab."

The mission had sounded crappy from the start and Lorne felt both sympathy and relief that it was clearly Sheppard's mission to take. Of course, the last time this had happened Lorne had ended up with it anyway (while Sheppard had been captured and tortured by Kolya), so he kept his yap shut about it. "At least we've recovered enough from the whale adventures to make jokes?"

Sheppard smiled weakly. "My ears are going to be metaphorically bleeding either way. Teyla's coming because she wants to get back on active duty, but I don't know why Ronon wants to come -- he's going to be bored off of his ass and picking fights within an hour. Throw in McKay bickering with Zelenka and the rest of their geek squad... On the other hand, I'm pretty sure this is going to cure Doctor Weir's wanderlust for a while."

Lorne grinned. They'd both escorted Weir around on missions benign and not and he understood the stress of it -- of having an additional person to have responsibility for, of worrying about how your team's dynamic would shift (and/or offend), of being the person to get the expedition's leader hurt or worse.

Sheppard was about to say something, but tilted his head as if to listen to his radio. "The _Pequod_ is packed and ready," he said with a smirk. "I'll catch you later."

"Have fun, sir," Lorne said.

With Weir, Sheppard, and McKay all out of the city, Lorne was more or less in charge -- Keller was technically the ranking civilian and if a crisis happened they would both be equally responsible to answer it, but the reality was that this was Lorne's watch. Keller was still adjusting to her new position within her unit, let alone within the city itself. Lorne was not the only one to wonder if watching her would give them any insight to what Sheppard must have gone through in the first days of the expedition. If it did, it probably wouldn't be from the near-permanent deer-caught-in-headlights look Keller wore. Yoni was still doing a lot of the administrative work -- far more than he'd done under Carson -- but Keller was still dizzy from her rapid climb from lowly researcher to city executive.

That in mind, Lorne made sure to wander into the control room after lunch, let himself be seen and be the target of the dozen stupid questions that might have otherwise gone to Keller (and the answer to all but two would be "wait for Doctor Weir" anyway, with the other two being "no").

"How's the fort, Lieutenant?" Lorne asked as he entered.

"Still holding, sir," Eriksson replied with a grin. The lieutenants liked it when Doctor Weir was not at her desk -- not that she was disruptive or in any way a problem, but the scientists did tend to be a little more docile when there was no possibility of an appeal waiting in the next office. "Colonel Sheppard's jumper docked at the station about half an hour ago."

Lorne arched an eyebrow and looked at his watch. "It took them that long to find the place?"

The jumper must have been a very, very unhappy place by the time they did.

"Apparently, sir," Eriksson replied and there was something in his expression that made Lorne think that the lieutenant (and probably the entire control room) had been audience to at least part of the jumper hijinx.

"I'm guessing this'll mean that they'll be calling in to extend the mission time," he said.

"I expect so, sir," Eriksson agreed wryly. "They're still on expedited activation, though, right?"

The normal 'grace period' for overdue missions was three hours, except when a mission was deemed high-risk. Having almost all of Atlantis's senior command in one jumper somewhere under the sea counted as high-risk.

"Hell yeah," Lorne answered over his shoulder as he crossed over to the plasma monitor where the jumper could be tracked. "So where are they?" he asked the guy at the console.

The scientist took a deep breath before rattling off a spiel on the technology of the station and how it had drifted over the millennia and possibly been drawn by magnetic energy within the planet's surface and... Lorne sort of drifted on the sea of words until he heard a number that might or might not have been the distance in nautical miles from the station to Atlantis.

"Thanks, Doc," he said, patting the guy on the arm -- Lorne thought his name was Ebersol, but if in doubt, 'Doc' worked -- and turned back to Eriksson. "I'm going down to the range if anyone's looking."

He trusted Eriksson to know that that meant anyone looking for Someone In Charge as opposed to him in particular. Yoni was doing a fair bit of gatekeeping on his own -- scaring off people who would take advantage of Keller's inexperience relative to her authority -- but it didn't hurt to share the responsibility. Yoni had enough enemies as it was.

The visit to the range was admittedly partly calculated -- it wouldn't stop people from chasing him down, but it did wonders for the vehemence of their pleas and arguments. But he did need the practice and maybe a little of the stress relief as well. It had been a long few weeks beyond the upheaval in Medical. The events that had triggered the episode in the first place had their own consequences -- new rules for what scientists (including and especially Engineering, which was collectively well aware of their favored status and tended to treat regulations as guidelines rather than obligations) could and couldn't do with or without marine escorts. New prohibitions among the civilians meant new responsibilities for the marines and that, in turn, required meetings and discussions and simultaneously threatening the scientists with the possibility of brandished firearms while also forbidding the marines from doing exactly that.

(It wasn't as bad as it could have been, although nobody really felt like gloating about it. McKay had lost a dozen people at least temporarily -- all three of the fatalities were from Science and all but one of the other casualties as well; Doctor Metzinger was back to half-days in his lab, if not yet ready for infirmary duty -- as well as Carson and nearly Teyla in the bargain. As a result, Rodney was neither interested or even maybe able to put up much of a fight when it came to scaling back the freedoms of his subordinates. Zelenka put up token protests, but that's all they were.)

It being the middle of the day, the range was full of marines. There was usually no room outside, where the platoons practiced more complicated maneuvers than destroying paper targets, and Lorne had reserved space inside. He signed in, collected a P-90, ammo, and ear and eye protection, and nodded acknowledgment to the smiling marines he passed. The marines were always a little smug every time anyone not them was at the range -- they _loved_ civilians -- but Lorne had yet to figure out the root cause of the marines' extra glee every time they saw him or Sheppard here.

He started with his 9mm, emptying a couple of clips (moderately tight groupings; he'd always been good with a pistol) just to get into the groove. When his hands and wrists were pleasantly humming, he switched over to the P-90. He rarely fired the rifle in the field -- the marines were better and quicker shots and the more likely scenario was them pushing him down to protect him. Yoni was a better shot as well, but it wasn't as if Lorne didn't know what he was doing with the thing. He'd been using one for years, could fieldstrip and swap out clips blindfolded, and his aim was not poor by any stretch of the imagination. Nonetheless, it could always get better and that's why he practiced.

Several hundred rounds had been fired by the time his radio earpiece -- tucked into his breast pocket while he wore protective earphones -- started vibrating. He safed the rifle and took off the earphones so he could put the radio on. "Lorne."

"Colonel Sheppard's team has missed their call-in time, sir," Eriksson reported. "They should have checked in fifteen minutes ago."

Lorne sighed. "Give 'em five more minutes, Lieutenant, then try to contact them. If you can't get through, notify the ready-room team that they're on standby."

"Aye aye, sir."

Lorne took the earpiece out, put his headphones back on, and policed his station; there would be no more practice rounds fired today. Hopefully, no more rounds fired at all.

The mood in the control room was a little tense, but not really very high up on the panic meter -- it hadn't yet been half an hour, everyone knew that Sheppard's team had a long history of wacky shit happening, and the nature of the mission meant that it was perfectly likely that someone had blown a fuse or accidentally unplugged something and it was just a matter of time before McKay and Zelenka were convinced to stop trying to fix it and go to the jumper to use its comm.

Unsurprisingly, Eriksson got no answer and so Lieutenant Patchok's marines were strapping on their gear in the ready room. Lorne radioed Keller himself, saying only that she should probably come to the control room. There wasn't much for Keller to do, but it was important for her to be present.

By the time Keller appeared, nervous but contained, Simpson -- the head of Engineering with Zelenka gone -- was already in the jumper bay figuring out what would be needed for the various kinds of problems that an underwater station could face. Nobody was saying that the main ones -- depressurization or loss of structural integrity -- were essentially death sentences so far away from help.

Lorne called for Patchok to meet them there and then escorted Keller up to hear what Simpson could tell them, which was essentially that she had collected tools that could work in deep water so that minor repairs could be effected -- or so that the rescue team could break in to the facility should that be necessary. They didn't have the proper undersea equipment, but they didn't have any qualified divers for this sort of work, either, so it was a moot point. Oxygen tanks, scuba gear, torches, and the rest, but the bottom line was that at the depth the station has sunk to, the work would have to be done by extending the jumpers' shields. Keller asked intelligent questions, fear forgotten in the face of duty, and Lorne didn't miss how the others reacted -- with relief and pride.

The next question, the one nobody but Lorne could answer, was to figure out who would drive the jumpers, since the marines couldn't fit in one even without the equipment and they would be giving a lift home to everyone already down there (one way or another; Simpson glossed quickly over the fact that body bags were being packed). Lieutenant Cardejo was the pilot on call and Lorne's not too worried about his relative inexperience -- this wasn't going to be fancy flying -- but there would have to be others and that wasn't going to be easy. Sheppard and McKay were down there, Beckett was dead, Paik was on Earth, Eriksson was on duty in the gate room, and Lorne knew that he himself had to be a last resort with so much of Atlantis's command missing. There were civilian pilots -- ATA carriers who'd been getting flying lessons -- but none of them would be able to handle this.

"Lieutenant?" Lorne radioed to Eriksson. "Hand the gate room over and report to the jumper bay, please. You're our lead pilot."

"Reletti can drive the third jumper," he told the others. "He's got more flight hours than any of the civilian pilots."

"He's got more flight hours than Cardejo," Patchok said, then radioed the ready room.

Reletti appeared a minute after Eriksson, Cardejo jogging across the room from the other side. Lorne explained the mission as Simpson and Doctor Zigmanis, the guru of the jumper bay, played loadmasters, splitting the cases according to likelihood of use and free space to bring back everyone trapped beneath the water. By the time the marines trundled up, they had adjusted their own equipment to reflect the fact that it was far more likely that they would be doing heavy lifting than getting into a firefight. Keller quizzed them on various first aid procedures -- including drowning scenarios and whether they could recognize signs of the bends.

There was little fanfare in sending off the jumpers. Lorne and Keller headed back to the stairs that would take them down to the control room.

"Does this happen often?" Keller asked as they entered the stairwell.

"'This' as in most of the command of Atlantis going missing at once or 'this' as in interruptions to the normal course of business in Atlantis?" Lorne asked by way of reply as he held the door open for her.

"I've been here long enough to have a very grim view of what passes as the normal course of business in Atlantis, Major," Keller said. "But I honestly didn't pay attention to how often Carson or Yoni were called upon to be more than doctors. Carson, at least. Lord knows what Yoni's runnin' off to most of the time."

A quick smile since they both knew that Lorne was responsible for much of that.

"We don't lose Doctor Weir regularly," Lorne said, although now that he thought about it, they kind of did. "Colonel Sheppard and Doctor McKay more often. Me occasionally. The entire city once in a while. It's sort of a grab bag of chaos, but if you're worried about being left in charge of the city on a regular basis, I wouldn't."

"Nobody wanted to deal with the everyday," she said in a quiet voice as they moved through the hallway behind Weir's office. "That's why I got the job. It's just... when everything goes to hell in a handbasket on a weekly basis, why did they think that the junior member of the staff would be the best person to handle _that_?"

Lorne cocked an eyebrow. "Because so far you're doing just fine?"

He was rewarded by a surprisingly heartfelt smile. Which was nice, since things, as usual, got worse before they got better.


	19. 3x19: History Repeating

  
"--because Santa doesn't love you that much, amigo."

"Fuck you."

"Sorry, dude, but I'm saving myself for marriage."

"You tell that to Doctor Locardi?"

"Fuck off!"

Lorne let the bickering of his marines wash over him like the rain that was currently falling on them. They were all soaked to the skin -- the heavens had opened up in the middle of their visit to the Olkarans and the distance to the gate was too far to make running for it worth the effort. The planet was warm, the rain was cool, and so after they'd enjoyed the modest-but-effusive hospitality of what looked to be new allies (the Olkarans were mostly cloth-makers, which meant that there wasn't a whole lot Atlantis needed from them commercially), they had carefully tucked the samples they'd been given away with anything else that wouldn't stand up to getting soaked and made their way back to the gate at their own leisurely pace.

"That's not what you told her.... oh, don't do that, you _freak_ ," Suarez griped with annoyance and Lorne looked over to see what Reletti was doing just in case it was obscene. "Not on fucking Planet Monsoon."

Reletti was frozen in place with his head cocked, curious instead of cautious, like he was listening to some music the rest of them couldn't hear. Lorne could tell the others were watching him to see if he could sense whatever it was, too, but all he heard was the dull clatter of rain falling on trees and ground and all he felt was the damp cloth of his uniform and not any prickle that might mean Ancient technology.

"You got anything, Sergeant?" Lorne asked. The rain was comfortable now, but he couldn't say that he was at all excited by the idea of an extra couple of hours out here chasing whatever Reletti was trying to tune in.

There was no answer, so Ortilla snapped his fingers right in front of Reletti's face and waited for some kind of awareness to return. Reletti didn't space out all that much anymore -- ever, really -- but apparently he'd done so now. Lorne could only see Reletti's back and Ortilla's concerned expression, so he walked over, Yoni right behind him. Suarez was hanging back, clearly concerned but also mindful of their surroundings.

"It was kind of a sneak attack, sir," a clear-eyed Reletti explained with some sheepishness and not a little annoyance with himself. "I didn't hear anything and then all of a sudden, it was all I heard."

Lorne nodded. He waited a beat to see if Yoni wanted to do anything, but he didn't -- 'distracted by Ancient technology' was a familiar-enough diagnosis, Lorne supposed. "Do you still hear it?"

"Yes, sir," Reletti answered with a frown. "I don't know what it is or what it's supposed to be, but I don't think it's working right."

"Great," Lorne sighed. Chasing down malfunctioning Ancient tech _always_ turned out so well. "Are you going to be good to hunt for it?"

"Yes, sir," was the emphatic reply. Ortilla gave Reletti a knowing look and Reletti made a face. "It's like I've got bees in my ears, but I can kind of ignore it. It's annoying, not dangerous."

A snort from Yoni pretty much summed up what the rest of them thought about Reletti's ability to evaluate his own safety and well-being. But Reletti was probably right -- it wasn't as if Sheppard hadn't ever wandered off in Atlantis guided by the same kinds of impulses and they hadn't lost him yet. They'd lost Teyla, but while that was something else entirely, it also meant that Reletti was probably not going to be out of arm's reach of anyone this afternoon.

"All right," Lorne said, looking around and then at his watch. They were due back in about two hours, but it was probably easier to check in now. "Let's go dial Atlantis and tell them that we're going to be out here for a while longer."

He wasn't quite expecting a rubber stamp from Doctor Weir, but she sounded a little more reluctant than he'd expected she'd be. Sheppard had apparently taken his team out at her request and found something creepy and potentially dangerous on the planet the Taranans had re-settled on; she'd sent Nagley and a fire team out to support them and while everything seemed to be fine -- the Taranans had moved without warning, it seemed -- she was still a little nervous. However, when Lorne offered to return to Atlantis instead, she declined and told him to call in if he needed anything.

"We're on a short leash, aren't we, sir?" Ortilla asked after the wormhole closed.

"Probably," Lorne replied. If it was only Nagley and a team, then she couldn't have been _that_ worried -- but he expected that any missed check-ins or overdue returns would be met with prompt activation of the rest of the ready-room marines. "Let's make the most of the time we've got."

For all of the buzzing in Reletti's ears, he wasn't precisely sure of exactly where the device was ("Dude, why do you get the pixies with no fucking sense of direction?") and it took Lorne fiddling with the energy meter in his PDA to get them all the way there after Reletti led them to the general area.

"If he zones out again, you take him back to Atlantis," Yoni told Ortilla, who ignored Reletti's protest to agree. Lorne had no doubt that Ortilla would fling Reletti over his shoulder and carry him back if it came to it -- and Reletti knew it.

They pulled out their E-tools to dig, since _of course_ the damned thing was under ground. Or under mud, at least by this point. Reletti, annoyed by being closely watched and by the noise in his head ("shut the fuck up already," he could be heard muttering at the device), dug the most enthusiastically and was the one to hit paydirt about a meter down. It was a foot locker-sized case, obviously Ancient in design and meant to protect whatever was inside.

"It's going to be the size of a stamp," Yoni muttered as they struggled to free the large case from the sticky mire in the crater they'd dug. The rain had slackened off for a while, but picked up again while they were digging and it was now coming down in sheets. A large hole was a perfect collecting point for puddles that rapidly grew to wading pools and it took all five of them to lever the thing up enough so that Ortilla could get hands underneath and boost it up to the ground. Not before all of them had slipped and fallen as they'd lost their balance or the mud had tried to take their boots off as they'd fought for purchase.

There was a latch and Reletti had to fight with it to get it to unlock. The contents were bigger than a stamp, but not by much. Lorne had started to sense the device as soon as the case had been unearthed; it wasn't as loud to him as it clearly was to Reletti, but it was a kind of low-grade irritant -- not as low with the case open -- and Lorne was grateful that his gene didn't work as well as the real thing.

"Close it up," he said through slightly clenched teeth. "We'll let the ATA labs dick around with it."

Ortilla carried the box and Reletti didn't bother to pretend that he didn't want to be anywhere near it. Lorne didn't either and it was a brisk walk back to the stargate. The rain washed off the worst of the mud, but they were still more brown than anything else and Lorne tried to be grateful that at least the mud didn't stink.

"I don't want to be the poor fuckers who have to swab the deck after we come through the gate room," Suarez said as he finished dialing the DHD.

The wormhole opened with a kawoosh.

"Atlantis, we're going to need an ATA team to meet us," Lorne said as he sent his IDC. "And a mop, too."

McKay and his minions had developed some kind of portable shielded containers -- they looked like picnic coolers on trolleys -- that could be used to transport Ancient tech from the stargate to the labs equipped to deal with it.

"Roger that, sir," Lieutenant Murray said after a long pause, sounding a little strained. "Doctor Weir says you should come in anyway and wait here."

Lorne exchanged glances with Yoni; this was not standard procedure, although Lorne hadn't said that the device was dangerous. But Weir had been antsy before and maybe now she had reason to be concerned.

"Wilco, Lieutenant," Lorne answered. "We're coming through."

He stepped into the city and immediately looked up at the control room. Sheppard was standing on the catwalk and Lorne could see both Keller and McKay in Weir's office. There were no jokes from the gate room marines about their muddy state and one look at Sheppard's face told Lorne why. He'd seen that bleak expression enough to recognize it -- they'd lost someone, maybe more than one. It disappeared once Ortilla carried the case through; whatever had been making Reletti crazy for the last couple of hours was clearly an unpleasant surprise to Sheppard as well.

Nonetheless, Sheppard came downstairs to meet them as they waited for the ATA team, exchanging knowing looks of shared discomfort with Reletti before turning back to Lorne.

"We lost Nagley and three marines," Sheppard said without preamble. "Ponsky, Howard, and Demetrius Smith."

The others murmured sadly and Lorne nodded, not wanting to ask how just yet; Sheppard obviously blamed himself in part and Lorne wasn't going to force that kind of confession in front of anyone.

The gate room door opened and the ATA team came barreling in. There was an audible sigh of relief as the case was boxed and removed.

"Charlie Company's meeting at 2000," Sheppard told the marines, who were part of its First Platoon. "Captain Polito is with Second Platoon in the ready room."

It was tacit permission for the marines to stop by and Lorne knew that they took it as such; Matt would appreciate confirmation that the rest of his marines had returned safely. It was also a dismissal and Ortilla looked to Lorne, who nodded, before taking his rifle and Yoni's and exhorting the other two toward the gate room doors. The ready room was en route to the transporter.

"What else is going on?" Yoni asked, not unkindly, after they left. He wasn't looking at Sheppard, but instead up at Weir's office. He, too, had seen Keller.

"We stumbled into one of Michael's labs," Sheppard replied, grimacing bitterly at both Lorne and Yoni's surprised reactions. "He's building an army of anthropomorphic iratus bug super-soldiers and he's using Carson's research to do it."

Yoni spat out something that sounded like it might have been in Arabic.

"Yeah, that's pretty much how everyone else feels," Sheppard said. "Why don't the two of you go get changed and meet us upstairs."

It wasn't a suggestion. Lorne followed Yoni down to Medical and showered in the call room there, getting into the stall fully clothed and peeling off the layers under the hot water. He tried not to think about what he'd learned from Sheppard; they'd be going over (and over and over) it all enough that there was no need to start early. But it was still there in his mind -- Nagley had just started to really get into the groove of Atlantis and they'd lost three more marines and _Christ_ , could Project Michael please stop biting them in the ass? He stood with his face to the spray until he could hear movement outside the curtain, reluctantly turning off the water and wishing the trouble could go down the drain like the mud.


	20. 3x20: Ad Infinitum

"... so I figured that if you can fly a [Stratotanker](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratotanker), an asteroid really shouldn't be that much of a challenge."

"Are you dissing my choice of aircraft, sir?" Lorne asked, eyebrow cocked. They both knew that Sheppard's plan was not an insult to either Lorne or his KC-135s. Quite the opposite. The _Apollo_ had a couple dozen qualified fighter pilots, each far more experienced with the nuances of the F-302 than Lorne was, but Sheppard wanted _him_ up there.

"Wouldn't dream of it," Sheppard replied. "Although it's not as sweet as my ride."

Atlantis herself.

"She's been waiting for this," Lorne said.

* * *

... it's my canon that Lorne flew Stratotankers. He's a pilot, but he doesn't strike me as the fighter jock type. At least not my Lorne.

... yes, this is actually 100 words. An actual drabble. It was a challenge.

... yes, I might write a 'real' one later.


End file.
